Red rolling flash

Mainly red rolling flash solid!

This solid opal is from rough from Coober Pedy, an area known as ‘Diggers Gully’.  A very attractive stone.  This was showing it’s colour flash through the ‘skin’ in it’s rough opal state.

I took my time cutting this one.  There was some sand in the side which I’ve removed.  It’s always a fight when you have patches of bedrock or material in the body.  Sometimes it can be left and adds a uniqueness to the opal.  In this case, it needed to come out! I had to lose some weight but it was worth it. 

Besides the broad red rolling flash , there is also orange, yellow blue and green in this opal.

Cutting the back gave yet more flashes of red fire !

I’ve taken the photographs in a near daylight with an artificial source. Please feel free to comment on the post and photographs.

This red and green oval opal came as a bit of a surprise.

It was a piece of rough that was curved with a skin on both sides.  The edge had a bit of colour play but I knew due to the curve, I wouldn’t really be able to make a solid stone from it.  Out came my black agate.  After flattening both the rough and the backing, I married them and left to set!

This one took quite a bit of care.  It was fairly thin and the surface as well as being convex undulated quite a bit. Grinding little and inspecting often is the key.  To start with I believed I’d have a green pinfire flash but as tends to be the case with opals, this changed as the grinding and polishing continued.

The resulting stone has a greeny pinfire.  Then, when you turn it, you get a lovely redish glow flowing in form the sides. It’s more like a traditional doublet as the piece of opal is thinner than I tend to use.