u/GroundbreakingRich35

While I have the 80-index gear attached, I decided to make another pentagon. I think it passes the "is it pretty?" test but I'm still climbing the steep part of the learning curve and it shows. I'm a big fan of this material and the two colors it shows.

• Material: #55(ish) corundum straight from Alibaba
• Design: Pentagrammin by Jeffrey Hill
• Cutting sequence: 400 topper, 600 sintered, 3000 Active-8 on BATT, 60K Pandimonium PCD on BATT

Lessons learned

• I'm still having a hard time judging how far to leave meets short for prepolishing. I end up being so conservative that I leave myself waaaay too much to prepolish and it takes a lot longer than it should. Using Active-8 does mitigate this somewhat because it really moves facets but when I'm this inefficient it leads to screw-ups. In spite of leaving facets short by a mile, I still managed to overcut a few during prepolish. Oops.
• I typically cut everything, then prepolish everything, then polish everything but since this has a barion tier, I tried prepolishing/polishing P1 and G1 before moving on so I didn't have to deal with the barion tier in the way. Overall that seemed to work well.

https://reddit.com/link/1vqgd4s/video/oih52inymujh1/player

I've only been doing this for a couple of months but I'm slowly making progress. Still working on putting together a complete stone without a major malfunction but I'm getting there. My most common screw-up is zoning out when reading the diagram and missing an index or mindlessly adding 0.5 degrees to the angle you *just* read.

Anyway, I have an 80-index gear so this is the first stone I tried out using it. I wanted something low risk in terms of $$$ just in case I found out I hadn't gotten things aligned quite right after the gear change. I think it came out nicely.

• Material: Santa Ana Madeira citrine
• Design: Polaris by u/cowsruleusall
• Cutting sequence: 325 sintered, 600 sintered, 3000 Active-8 on BATT, CeO Battstik on Darkside

Lessons learned:

• With the right design and color, I'm now a fan of citrine! I think it shows that internal glow like an actual star.
• Be extra generous with prepolish stage and really knocking down the damage from earlier.
• Yeah quartz is a pain but once I finally figured out the amount of CeO/water, I could finally feel that "grab" people describe when it's working. The crown went a lot faster than the pavilion.

https://reddit.com/link/1vnvczw/video/omrlzo9r89jh1/player