By Lawrence Stoller If you were going to cut an 1800-pound quartz crystal, where would you start? The Golden One, about 700 kilos, 1400 lbs., 635,699 grams, or 3,178,000 cts. of Zambian citrine, 37” x 24” x 18”, will appear at the upcoming Tucson gem shows at the Holiday Inn-Broadway. Lapidary Lawrence Stoller looks from behind his giant gem. ->

Size doesn't matter, and bigger isn't always better, but . . .

From the moment I first saw the Golden One in its original state, a giant citrine crystal, I was enthralled. I knew it was a fantastic piece with a beautiful interior and tremendous potential, but when the massive crate containing the four-foot-tall quartz weighing close to a ton actually landed at my doorstep, my excitement was mixed with a feeling of overwhelming inadequacy: now my fantasy of cutting this crystal was nose to nose with reality.

Reality sinks in when the 4' long, 1800-lb. crusty-skinned crystal arrives in its packing crate.

As an artist, I considered this a restoration project. To me, this large Zambian citrine quartz was a natural resource rather than cutting rough: old growth, a grandfather, witness to millions of years on earth. I saw the challenge before me as one of both preserving and enhancing Nature's design. Maintaining the integrity of the crystal's original shape was paramount to me, but I also wanted to make evident the interior's still-masked but stunning and vast expanse of golden clarity, which I could only glimpse as I peered into windows chipped in the quartz's thick, encrusted skin.

Too big for me to reach around it with my arms, this giant also forced me as a craftsman to recognize that in this case size definitely did matter. The quartz's disfigured exterior and severely damaged faces at the tip meant that I would have to do extensive reshaping and finishing. In order to cut and polish this magnificent crystal, I would need a way of accommodating its massive size and weight: all 4 x 2-1/2 x 2 feet and 1800 pounds of it.

Standing on a mat atop the carriage system and using a mechanical arm that allows him to work at any angle, Lawrence Stoller grinds the crystal face that will become the front of the Golden One.

I was not without experience at working on crystals measured in feet rather inches - Glenn Lehrer and I had spent many years developing tools and techniques for cutting and polishing large crystals - most notably the “megagem” sculpture, Bahia, now on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County - but the massiveness of the Golden One demanded that I start the tooling process from the ground up.

While I was able to conceive of the ideal tools I would need, few would be available ready-made from my lapidary suppliers, and the idea of actually designing and building this equipment was daunting. I spent the first several months and a great deal of money working with engineers to devise and locate tools and machinery, hoping to cobble together a workable system, but it seemed that every great idea led nowhere.

What I did find was a personal drive powered by my commitment to the stone, a point I cannot overemphasize for its very concrete usefulness. I envisioned the possibility of this stone standing the test of time, being a marvel, a natural wonder to be enjoyed through the next millennium. My doubts about successfully cutting the crystal were countered by remembering other seemingly insurmountable tasks I had completed. Without the proper equipment, there was no chance for success, but the tools I really came to rely on were imagination, a hearty desire, and a genuine belief that I could do it as long as I kept an open mind and trusted that the details would resolve themselves if I kept the project moving forward.

Engineer Peter Small's arrival on the scene started the wheels turning in the design, fabrication, and integration of equipment that had existed only in my imagination. While we were dealing with many complex components that needed to work together, we wanted to keep the engineering as basic as possible. I needed a carriage system to hold and move the crystal; a hoist system that could maneuver several thousand pounds (more than enough for the crystal and the carriage system bearing it); a 10-foot-high wire saw with a cutting capacity of 48 inches; a suitable delivery platform consisting of a massive concrete-and-steel “runway” table; and, finally, prepolishing and finishing tools on a scale grand enough for working the immense flat surfaces with areas measuring more than 41/2 square feet.

POSITIONING. One of the most critical issues was to devise a way to move the stone easily to any location on the runway table. Lifting the stone was a delicate process that we would have to repeat numerous times, because for each saw cut and each phase of prepolishing, the crystal would need to be hoisted, leveled to the right plane, wedged for stability, scootched, shifted, plumb-bobbed, and eyeballed into position. There was no room for error: one wrong move or one unsecured strap could spell disaster not only for the crystal but anyone working underneath it.

Lawrence Stoller prepares to hoist the crystal from its packing crate. The cable comes from a hang glider, the bucket is weighted with 25 lbs. of - what else? - rocks.

We started out with the concept of floating the crystal and its carriage on a cushion of air, powered by an air compressor. Shaped like upside-down pots, each about two inches deep and a foot across, four “floats” made of a hardened plastic were placed beneath the carriage, one at each corner. When we turned the compressor on, air filled the pots and the pressure simply lifted and floated the carriage with its crystal cargo above the runway, suspending over 2,000 pounds on a thin plane of air. Unlike the butterfly, this crystal learned to fly before its metamorphosis took place.

The air system soon gave way to water, however, when the demand became too great on the compressor. Then we found that water actually worked much better. We just hooked the garden hose up, filled the floats with water via a tube, and had a hydroplaning carriage that would literally move over one ton with the touch of a finger. As a convenient fail-safe, if the carriage were to swing beyond the runway table and threaten to glide off, the water forced into the floats or pots that lifted the carriage would have a means of escape, instantly bringing the carriage to rest on the table.

To bring the crystal to the stationary saw for cutting, we constructed a simple pulley system driven by a 25-pound bucket of rocks, using an old hang glider cable (Peter used to teach hang gliding and happened to have one - you never know when these things will come in handy). We attached one end of the cable to the carriage, ran the cable through a pulley in the ceiling, and attached the other end to the bucket. To ensure a straight cut, we affixed the carriage to a track, which guided the crystal's delivery to the saw.

Originally, I had chosen to outfit my studio with pneumatic tools powered by an air compressor. The pneumatic tools tend to be lighter in weight, and with the constant use of water in the environment, including discs that are lubricated by water, I wanted to insure that there was no possibility of a hair-dryer-in-the-bathtub-type mishap. In the end, though, I added electric tools. I discovered that though they're heavier, there are electric tools that are designed for safe use around water. They also have other advantages, namely you don't have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of an air compressor.

A carriage floating on a thin layer of water brings the crystal to the wire saw.

SAWING. The sawing process is when the actual symmetry, shape, and character of the piece are determined. I needed a saw powerful enough to cut through quartz and big enough to accommodate something more the size of a desk than jewelry, not to mention the weight of a small car.

What I came up with was a wire saw manufactured by an Austrian company for cutting stone monuments. This saw, the Dia-Tech BS 5000, was both large and small enough for my purposes. How so? Wire saws can be enormous pieces of equipment - they're used in Italy to slice through mountainsides of marble - and the smallest I'd previously seen filled a 30-by-20-foot room. By comparison, this machine was petite! While mine would be a monstrous undertaking in the lapidary field, it certainly wasn't carving mountains, a thought that helped put my challenges into perspective.

I had the machine modified to extend its length, which allowed me the larger cutting aperture I needed to accommodate the girth of the crystal. The manufacturer reminded me repeatedly throughout the project that he couldn't be responsible for problems we encountered. Because we had modified the design of the machine and were cutting harder material than the saw was designed for, all bets were off.

We were asking the diamond wire saw blade to move through hard quartz to a depth of 30 inches and a length of 48. The saw would often run for 12 to 14 hours a day, and we often had to shut down in mid cut, only to resume the next day. Problems of attrition occurred because of the massive sizes. As the hundreds of half-inch diamond-sintered beads wore down and dulled, the wire would snap under the extraordinary torque and pressure induced by the machine. So Peter and I added the art of crimping wire cable together to our respective resumes. To my dismay, I found that there was no device for resharpening the sintered diamond beads, so I got a grinder with Carborundum wheels and set about hand-sharpening each bead.

It took an entire year to work out the repeatedly occurring kinks involved with the wire saw and to just finish sawing the crystal, but at last the exterior shape revealed itself. Now I wanted to let the wonderful color and transparency of the interior emerge for all to see.

The “polishing” arm, affectionately called “Megilla” (the Gorilla), is on standby.

GRINDING. The wire saw is a much more aggressive device than a typical lapidary circular diamond saw. The cut is ragged and coarse, unlike the clean surface a circular saw leaves, so when we finished sawing, I moved to a coarse 40-grit grinding wheel, followed by a finer 60-grit grinding wheel.

I did this not only to even out the high and low ripples from the saw cut, but also to insure that I would be starting with the flattest surfaces possible before beginning the next stage. A warped surface, even one that is only slightly rolled or rippled, will create considerable optical distortion after polishing, sacrificing the visual impact of the finished piece. I worked by eye and then I used a 24-inch straight edge to verify that I had a flat, uniform surface.

At this point, I introduced a fully gimbaled mechanical arm that holds the lapping wheel, providing a flat, stable working surface from any angle. Apparently, like the wire saw, this Japanese-made machine, the Alpha Professional Tools MPW-500, was also developed for the monument industry. While it had failed to catch on in that industry, the arm proved to be the tool I was dreaming of. To my dismay, however, the company at first paid no attention to my repeated attempts to buy the machine. After many months, I did manage to wrestle one away from them, and I had the perfect tool with which to execute the finishing work.

Sunni and Lawrence Stoller, Peter Small, Timothy Turco, and Fred Valenzuela pose with the finished giant citrine. Photo: Julian Goble.

POLISHING. After I had achieved my flat surface with the grinding wheels, I commandeered my assistant Timothy Turco to begin the prepolish phase. I referred to this activity as “riding the bull” or “rock climbing.” Getting up and into position to work on this immense creature carried with it a sense of awe, and it sometimes felt as though we were hanging on for the ride of our lives.

For anyone who cuts or facets hard gem material, it quickly becomes obvious that the larger the cut surface, the more work it is to achieve the finished polish. On a very large surface, the amount of work increases exponentially. For example, working one large face with the 100 grit took about 16 hours of very physical effort, which also demands total concentration. Too little pressure and you don't get anything done, too much pressure and you risk fracturing the stone because of the heat caused by the friction. After a day's work, Tim was happy to “come down off the mountain.”

We used 8-inch maple lap disks impregnated with diamond paste and mineral oil as the lubricant. We started with the maple laps and a 60/100 grit diamond paste for taking out the surface pits, then proceeded in a normal lapidary progression to 220, 325, and 600 grit before attempting the final polishing stage using cerium oxide.

Tim and my other assistant, Freddie Valenzuela, worked meticulously to achieve what we call a “circuit board” finish. The polish is as bright as it can get when an intricate pattern resembling a circuit board appears on some surfaces as viewed from just the right angle. (You can get a similar effect by rubbing a pencil on a piece of paper held over a coin.)

We tried and abandoned many ideas and techniques along the way, constantly adjusting our setup as we progressed, and we continue to modify the tools and techniques on new projects. We certainly could have come up with a different “toolology,” so it's easy to imagine that another lapidary might incorporate very different approaches to achieve a similar result.

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED to thinking of lapidary tools as saws, grinders, laps, and polishing disks, but like any challenging work, a unique crystal calls forth personal tools of vision, courage, persistence, problem solving, thoroughness, satisfaction, and most importantly, fun.

In this spirit, I did not retain a sharpened-pencil awareness of all the ongoing costs I was incurring. This was a speculative venture, an adventure, and I didn't want to be encumbered by the worries of how much money I was spending. Accounting with a short memory can be a very useful tool, and besides, my wife, Sunni, kept accurate tabs on my spending, allowing me the luxury to keep pushing forward in a state of moderately ignorant bliss.

Three years after we started, the transformation of the Golden One was complete. It now weighs roughly 700 kilos, 1400 pounds, 635,699 grams or 3,178,000 carats, and stands 37 inches high, 24 inches wide, and 18 inches deep - but these are only the numbers. Its real heart and soul lie in the spellbinding depths of its beckoning interior, the rainbows that ricochet off its polished surfaces, and the dancing glow of its rich, golden light.

Lawrence Stoller specializes in the cutting and polishing of very large crystals. He can be contacted via his company's Web site at www.crystalworks.com (which also gives more information on the Golden One), or via voice at 541-388-1721.

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