our home made cabachon machine

Our Home Made Cabachon Machine

Welcome to our article abut how we built our homemade cabochon machine, in all it cost about £250.00 including wheels, motor and shaft and everything else that went into it. Here is a picture of the complete machine as you can see it’s relatively compact, none too pretty but it does the job. The whole […]

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Picture showing the shaft and pulleys

Homemade Lapidary Equipment

The cabachon machine has seen quite a lot of service since it was built last summer and has stood up to the test of time so far

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When is black agate not black agate – when its flint!

Well I had a “field day” no pun intended, as you can see from the picture I filled my boots, this field has lumps of flint all over the place.

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Black Agate – What A Find

I peered into a field and was amazed to see it was literally littered with lumps of agate

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Carnelian Pendant js432

Carnelian Rough To Finished Pendant

Here we present a finished Carnelian pendant supported by a piece of rough Carnelian to illustrate the sorts of things we do in our workshop. The cabachon was first cut as a slab from the rough rock and was then shaped on our cabachon machine and finally polished on a felt wheel with cerium oxide […]

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Time to prepare the workshop for use again

Timw to get the Lapidary workshop ready for use.

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Cutting and Polishing

Welcome to our messy world of Lapidary, yes Lapidary is very messy but extremely rewarding, it really brings out the “creative” in you, sometimes with realising it. So what is Lapidary, well as far as we are concerned it’s all about taking a lump of stone, be it a semi precious piece from our stocks […]

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Rough Sodalite

Here we have a fine rough Sodalite specimen weighing approximately 164 grams. Picture taken when the stone is dry. Sodalite is a deep blue mineral, often with white deposits of calcite running through it. This piece would be fine for cutting and polishing into cabochons for use in jewellery making. Sodalite has a hardness rating […]

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Rose Quartz

Rose Quartz

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