Find companies that, cut, shape, carve, polish and give a facelift to all gemstones
Find details of companies that provide mining production services on gemstones and lapidary. On this site you will find companies that manufacture, cut, shape, carve, polish and give a facelift to all different types of gemstones in Zambia. Check this section for further information on where to find these companies. A lapidary is an artist or artisan who forms stone, minerals, or gemstones into decorative items such as cabochons, engraved gems, including cameos, and faceted designs. The primary techniques employed are cutting, grinding, and polishing. There are surprising diversity of gemstones in Zambia; emeralds, rubies, beryl, coral, garnet, feldspar, opal, quartz, sapphire, ruby, topaz, tourmaline and turquoise.
The process of cutting and polishing gems is called gem cutting or lapidary, while a person who cuts and polishes gems is called a gem cutter or a lapidary or lapidarist. These skilled artisans will be working for the gemstone companies in Zambia listed in this section.
Gemstone material that has not been extensively cut and polished is referred to generally as rough. Rough material that has been lightly hammered to knock off brittle, fractured material is said to have been cobbed.
All gems are cut and polished by progressive abrasion using finer and finer grits of harder substances. Diamond, the hardest naturally occurring substance, is used as an abrasive to cut and polish a wide variety of materials, including diamond itself. Silicon carbide, a manmade compound of silicon and carbon, is also widely used for cutting softer gemstones. Other compounds, such as cerium oxide, tin oxide, chromium oxide, and aluminium oxide, are frequently used in polishing gemstones.
- Sawing - In most gem sawing, a thin circular blade usually composed of steel, copper, or a phosphor bronze alloy impregnated along the outer edge with diamond grit and rotating at several thousand surface feet per minute literally scratches its way through a gemstone.
- Grinding - usually with silicon carbide wheels or diamond-impregnated wheels, is used to shape gemstones to a desired rough form, called a preform.
- Sanding - is similar to grinding but uses finer abrasives. Its purpose is to remove deep scratches left by coarser abrasives during grinding.
- Lapping is very similar to grinding and sanding, except that it is performed on one side of a rotating or vibrating flat disk known as a lap, and it is used especially to create flat surfaces on a stone
- Polishing - After a gemstone is sawed and ground to the desired shape and sanded to remove rough marks left by coarser grits, it is usually polished to a mirror-like finish to aid light reflection from the surface of the stone (or refraction through the stone, in the case of transparent materials).
- Drilling - When a gem cutter desires a hole in or through a gemstone (e.g., a bead), a small rotating rod or tube with a diamond tip, or a slurry of silicon carbide and coolant, is used to drill through the stone.
- Tumbling - Large quantities of roughly shaped stones are often tumbled. Turned at a slow speed in a rotating barrel with abrasives and water for extended periods of days or weeks.
