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Author Topic: Diamond Smoothing Disks  (Read 10050 times)

Taz

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Re: Diamond Smoothing Disks
« Reply #15 on: February 25, 2015, 08:45:38 AM »
Quote
I've been puzzling over why this may have happened and I finally came to the conclusion that I may have still had some vinegar in my water on my faceting machine.  I don't know if this would cause the epoxy to soften but I do notice since using a fresh supply of water I'm not experiencing any accelerated wear on the 600 or 3000 laps

Taz, a while back I had a piece of malachite glued to a bit of timber with about half a tube of epoxy. I was advised to soak it in vinegar to remove it. After soaking overnight, the epoxy was as soft as putty and the piece of stone pulled away easily. It had actually partly dissolved and turned green, presumably having absorbed copper from the malachite.

I also removed a garnet that had be epoxy resined to the dop with vinegar - the stone just fell off overnight.

In my experience, plain white vinegar will definately attack epoxy!
Looks like it was probably the vinegar then.  Glad I didn't do a dummy spit and make a fool of myself.  Thanks everyone.  New soft lap that I ordered is supposed to arrive today so I'll keep the vinegar away from it :)

Aussie Sapphire

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Re: Diamond Smoothing Disks
« Reply #16 on: February 25, 2015, 09:34:19 AM »
Looks like it was probably the vinegar then.  Glad I didn't do a dummy spit and make a fool of myself.

That was not an issue - it is all good information that we can remember for next time.  Hopefully new one will work a lot better for you.  Sometimes you learn just as much when things go a bit wrong as when they work out perfectly.

cheers
Leah
Aussie Sapphire - The Lapidary Warehouse

Taz

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Re: Diamond Smoothing Disks
« Reply #17 on: February 25, 2015, 07:40:11 PM »
New 220 soft lap arrived this morning.  I tried it out on a couple of the chrysoprase cabs I've gradually been working; they were ready for smoothing.  Very happy with it.  For some reason I never had any of the slow behaviour that I had with the 325 lap and I didn't have to use the supercharged settings on my faceting machine either to get good smoothing performance.  Perhaps the grit difference accounts for it but it doesn't seem to be a big enough gap to account for the difference I noted.

If anyone else is thinking of purchasing these I'd recommend going with the 220 and 600 grits.  I also have a 3000 but its naturally more for pre-polish than smoothing.  Anyway, I'm now very happy with the current combination.

DavidOwen

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Re: Diamond Smoothing Disks
« Reply #18 on: October 16, 2015, 12:29:20 PM »
Glad I found this thread. I just cannot seem replicate the results from an official larimar online shop.

Their product:



I'll try out some of these suggestions, honestly hope it works :)
« Last Edit: October 21, 2015, 01:31:53 PM by DavidOwen »

mangomick

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Re: Diamond Smoothing Disks
« Reply #19 on: October 18, 2015, 07:40:04 PM »
Just replaced the transom on our fibreglass boat and white vinegar is what we used to clean the epoxy off the brushes  and for getting the epoxy off our hands in preference to acetone.
That was only when it was tacky or just going off but I would imagine if fairly fresh epoxy on a stone was left in a jar with vinegar it would soften it.
 

 

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