ORDINARY blokesGUIDE to OPAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Titles Page Numbers Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Rainbow Stone with a Personality 8 Chapter Two: Defining Terms used in connection with the opal industry 10 Chapter Three: Fossil Opal 27 Chapter Four: Where Opal is found in Australia 30 Chapter Five: Opal Mining & Fossicking 38 Chapter Six: Opal Cutting Machinery 47 Chapter Seven: Opal Cutting & Processing 53 Chapter Eight: Making Doublets and Triplets 73 Chapter Nine: Setting your Stones 79 Chapter Ten: Valuing your Stones 94 Chapter Eleven: Selling your Stones 101 Chapter 12: Additional Information 117 Ordinary Blokes Guide to Opal But imagine being able to cut away at a stone that has been lying in “ You’ve heard it the ground for untold thousands of years, and finding you’re very own said that the initial inside the rock, highlighted in precious sweetest sound opal…. Then, as if that’s not enough, you find you can hear is the another one with your wife’s initial too! Hard sound of your own to believe? Well, here they are …just to prove name, and I guess it. This unique opal matrix is found in the that applies to Koroit field near the town of Cunnamulla in everyone, even an Western Queensland, Australia. ordinary bloke. “ Although I have compiled a certain amount of detailed definitions, this book is not written primarily as a technical guide. A lot of detailed information has already been written by people more qualified than myself, so I will leave that to the gemologists and the chemistry experts. The book is written with the ordinary person in mind, who does not really need to know a lot of technical data to learn how to cut, polish, and deal in opal. I have however, given attention to basic terms that are associated with the stone and have tried to explain their meanings in everyday language so that you don’t have to keep looking up the dictionary to know what is meant. I have tried to develop the subject logically, starting with terms associated with the stone. Sometimes you read a book on a subject, and by the time you get to the middle, you suddenly realize you just don’t get what it’s talking about. Ordinary Blokes Guide to Opal | Page 1 It’s like driving a car with no wheels. The car is where you sit, but the wheels take you to where you’re going. Such is the case with definitions. The understanding of terms associated with opal takes you on a journey of opal discovery. B u t y o u d o n ’ t necessarily have to know the technical structure of the tire, in order to embark on a journey. F r o m a n understanding of r e l a t e d terminology, I have d e v e l o p e d t h e subject through a Figure 1 Figure 2 definition of the stone itself, where it i s m i n e d , t h e lapidary (opal cutting) machinery you need to work with it, how to set it, value it, and sell it. The book also tackles the challenge of how to turn your hobby into a business, for, after all, there’s no point having a lot of stones decorating your workshop while the bills pile up. Working from home is the dream of many a hobbyist and with today’s revolutionary communication systems, there’s no reason why your hard work and fun in the garage cannot be turned into cash. Cash that can not only pay bills but also buy more sophisticated equipment to make your hobby even more interesting. And of course, even if you use your creations as gifts, it saves on buying gifts from shops, and that in itself means money. Ordinary Blokes Guide to Opal | Page 2 After all, that’s just what happened to most opal cutters and dealers like myself, and if I can do it, nearly anyone can. Have fun…..And keep in touch with [email protected] or go for a regular tour of the Australian Opal fields at: www.opalmine.com So you are an ordinary “bloke” or “guy” or “gal” as the Americans would put it!! Maybe you’re not so ordinary. Maybe you know a lot more about the gem industry than I do. Maybe you are an expert opal cutter with years of experience. Whatever you are, it doesn’t really matter, the learning process never ends if you are open minded enough to recognize that fact. After cutting opal for about 30 years, one day an old bloke walked into the Opal Miner’s Hut and said: “How do you “dop” an opal?” After a lengthy description of the traditional heated sealing wax method, he said, “That’s a bit of a long winded way of doing it!” I swallowed my pride and listened to his simple suggestion. His idea revolutionized my thinking of this procedure and started my use of timber glues for dopping instead of epoxy. This in turn got me thinking about a more effective way of using water on wet and dry sandpaper for sanding. (More about that later) “What is learned from an experience like that is that we don’t stop learning no matter how much we think we know about a subject. From my experience in life, the danger in being an “expert” is that you can become tunnel visioned in your approach to things.” Ordinary Blokes Guide to Opal | Page 3 No matter how much experience one has had, there is always someone else who may disagree and have a better idea. If you have a better idea than I have expressed, please tell me. My ears are flapping! And of course, there’s Hale Sweeny’s Internet Newsletter, “Lapidary Digest” ([email protected]) Hale runs this marvelous international question and answer show for rock hounds. A free service that shows there are still people in this world keen to be helpful. Rock Hounds (lapidary people), have a name for being helpful. Having said that, I believe that what is needed to work the stone, and gain tremendous satisfaction out of producing a gem, is a little common sense and ability to work with your hands. Most of us started off without the valuable experience recorded in this book or CD, so if you read it carefully, in just a short time, you should accomplish what it took me ten years and thousands of dollars worth of mistakes to find out. I must also state that I have more than one reason for writing this book. First, it’s the only book I have ever written or am likely to write, so it’s a good challenge. Secondly it will hopefully make more people aware of this magnificent stone, and get much pleasure out of either cutting it, dealing in it, or both. Thirdly it may encourage more people to buy it and help all the people including myself and the rest of the battling opal miners in Lightning Ridge and other fields to sell more opal. Ordinary Blokes Guide to Opal | Page 4 The more people know about opal, the more opal will be bought and sold. Then everyone will be making a better living. That is why the book or CD does not just tell you about opal itself, but later lets you know how other people feel about the stone and what you can do to turn it into a business. You can only get a certain amount of help out of books. The rest is left up to practice. You have to experience the feeling of stones popping off “dop sticks” to learn how to avoid it. If you want to give yourself a kick-start, why not join a lapidary club for a while? There’s probably one not far from you. The name should appear in your telephone directory under “Lapidary Clubs”. There could also be some person who has a bit of time on his or her hands who could give you some personalized tuition. “Rockhounds” as they are called, are often an obliging bunch, particularly if you have a nice opal specimen that you could part with as a little payment. If you do this however, take this tip from a person who has had a lot to do with all sorts of gemstones apart from opal over the past thirty years. If you want to become an opal expert, don’t get sidetracked into learning other lapidary arts such as faceting (Stones cut with multi-angled tables or facets like diamonds), at least until you master cab cutting. Faceting takes a lot more expensive equipment, is more difficult to learn, takes a lot of time (one stone could take a day to cut), and in most cases the efforts are not rewarded because the job is already being done very cheaply by large well organized factories using cheap Labor. With practice, you can cut an opal in a matter of minutes, particularly if you do them in larger amounts. You could spend days perfecting a sapphire facet, only to find that you could buy the whole stone for a few dollars from someone importing from Thailand. To a degree, the same thing applies to cabochons, (dome topped stones) but the difference with opal is that much of the better quality rough from Lightning Ridge is offered on an individual basis to whoever has the money at the time the Miner Finds it, and whoever is willing to offer the best price.