I feel like the garnet I cut first lulled me into a false sense of security. I did myself no favors picking a more complex cut, either. Quartz is ANNOYING!
The video mercifully does not show it, but my meetpoints are absolute trash on this stone. I used way too much force and popped it off the dop when polishing my pavilion, so my girdle and my crown don’t quite align either.
I struggled heavily with the prepolish step, which in turn led to my polish taking ages. I’m currently using a Zinc+ with 8k Pandimonium which was dreamy on my garnet but the quartz was less enthusiastic about it. Am I just underestimating quartz? What do you guys use for prepolishing?
In my experience, quartz requires patience due to the hardness. It cuts slow and you will find yourself using more force than you need to resulting in popping the stone off of the dop. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done exactly that… even these days knowing better I still do.
When I do quartz, mostly amethyst these days, I use a REALLY old crystalite 3k aluminum lap. This thing is at least 30 years old and still prepolishes nicely. With quartz I almost get a polish on the facets. I’ve tried the newer versions of this lap, and they are complete trash, as they have an imperfect surface which causes deep scratches on the surface you are trying to prepolish. I’m going to have to get a new pre-polish lap soonish as I can tell that my trusty 3k is nearing the end of its life. 😔
For polish I use 60k diamond on a Batt.
Thanks for the advice! It seems the overwhelming theme here is I need a nice 3k lap. I might try Lightnings Laps to see how they do.
I know I’m nowhere near this point, but how does an end-of-life lap behave? Does it just polish slower, or start to polish unevenly, or…?