New rabbit hole

Thank you! There weren't any YouTube videos that I watched that were so good that I remember them, though I did get some good tips (and some not so good). There was an 11 or 12 episode tutorial on YouTube from Ultra Tec that was good as a general overview though, and I watched them all prior to doing anything on the machine. The first stone, the amethyst, took me about 4 hours. The beam splitter probably better than 10 hours, but I expected that in the learning process. The amethyst I cut following the tutorial in the Ultra Tec manual, and even if you don't have an Ultra Tec I think a lot of it would still apply and may be helpful to you. You can download it from www.ultratec-facet.com/v5-manual/ and the walk-thru is near the back of the manual.

For that beam splitter cut, I chose an open design from www.facetdiagrams.org/ that I thought might be cool with that material, and just stumbled my way through figuring out how to read it after watching something on YouTube about following design diagrams. Some diagrams have notes in the steps, which makes it easy, but the one I was cutting didn't so I scratched a bald spot on the top of my head

Having only cut 2 stones, you now have the extent of my knowledge on this topic LOL. Hope it helps. Don't be intimidated, just go for it, it's fun! You could even practice on glass if you're afraid of killing your rough, I played around with a marble for a bit before jumping on that amethyst, and it was helpful for sure.

Good luck!