Dimensionless cutting

0.006"

There are 6" cutoff blades with a very thin kerf of roughly 6mil

He has one piece only and lapis is not very glassy.

May very well work though!! Good idea!

Faceters cut precious stones with a super thin blade. I think Amertool has one.

If no faceters around, maybe somebody who does intarsia has such a blade.
On the other hand, could you change your plan to use it as is?

Or sand it down to desired size--- but that would waste some.

Good luck!

Thanks for the ideas - keep 'em coming!

I have diamond blades and can achieve a couple of mm kerf.

I only have the one piece of really good material, but I'm just micro-slabbing a rough sample, hoping to get a slabette around 1mm thick. Some of the left over will be the white stuff that I can thin right down to approx 1mm and then use to trial any of the more creative methods.

I wondered about thin copper wire run thro' diamond dust and setting it as a saw blade in a piercing saw. It might be worthwhile just trying a piercing saw and seeing if it gets any gain. At 1mm thick there's not much to get through.

6mm is definitely more than I can lose. The utility knife idea might just work. Come to think of it, I also have a modelling saw that can cut soft metals and might just stretch to lapis.

Facetters are few and far between here in the UK. A facetting saw might be on the horizon but that's a long way off for the present.

Thanks again for your ideas. Any more?

If your lapis ain’t conductive enough you could always try . . .

. . . a new method for machining of nonconductive ceramic workpieces in electric discharge machining (EDM) was developed. Machining surfaces of nonconductive workpieces were coated with a conductive layer (CL) and graphite powder was added to dielectric fluid for machining. Al2O3, ZrO2, SiC, B4C and glass workpiece samples were machined by using the method.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10910344.2010.500497

'Cept it isn't ... my phone's out of charge and my charger's at the office. Sorry! Will try tomorrow / fri.

Experiments today found that a piercing saw would just about cut thin lapis. The cutting was very slow, to the point that 100-200 sawing actions resulted in 1mm progress. The cut slot widened to more than the saw-blade thickness, a couple of mm, something similar to the diamond blades I use with a dremel. Given the cutting time, I resorted to the dremel (on my test-piece).

My plans are as below. It would be good to cut to achieve both a pendant and two small triangles from the one piece. This depends on thin cuts, similar to the pen-lines, ideally.



(Note: if it's not obvious from the rough, this next piece isn't the slabbette / design above ... that wouldn't have worked out very well at all! )

Inspired by the Lapis slabbette I bought at just 1mm thick, I decided to try my hand cutting this Lapis Lazuli 1mm thick flat buff cabochon ... it worked!

Beautifully polished; rubbish pictures - my bad; I'll try again later

No sorry Pat. All I see is broken Flickr images in the post directly above - Flickr images only break if they are removed by the user.