How to Work with Amber
Quality rough amber is brilliant lapidary material. It can be cut, grinded, drilled, carved and polished. The amber is very soft, can be worked easily, but strong enough to withstand wearing against scratches and cracks. To grind the amber manually it is important to have good fan extractor, the amber dust is very strong medicine in small quantity, but large amount may cause negative effect. First raw grinding is done on sanding wheel or belt with approx 100 grit sandpaper. It requires
some skills to not grind away your fingers. On this stage the natural skin of amber is being moved away and rough shape given to amber specimen. If sandpaper disk is used, some soft base as a rubber disc will help to avoid flat facets. The next stage is prepolishing on the mop. The amber likes compounds with high amount of wax, grey polishing compound is great for first polishing, do not use coloured compounds like a rouge it may get into micro pores and colour the amber. During this period of work you can alter the shape of amber polishing it in the meantime. When your masterpiece will ripped from your hand by mop and rocketed to far corner of the workshop - do not worry! Not only you, but even very experienced lapidary spent lot of time looking for dropped gemstone. The final polishing requires soft clean mop and strong fingers. A perfect polishing compound may be prepared by blending chalk powder with candle wax, but regular toothpaste works great. The amber may be tumbled as majority of other gemstones. First tumbling is done with sand and water in order to remove hard skin of amber. The barrel must be made of metal because the sand is strong abrasive. Next stage is tumbling with soap water and pumice, if you will use the same barrel please wash it carefully, because single piece of sand may spoil all the amber polishing. After spinning around 12 hours the amber material will look nearly finished. The last touch is tumbling in the dry barrel. The barrel must be hexagonal and made of wood or other soft material such as plastic. The amber must "breath" when is being tumbled, so net of small holes is drilled for this purpose. The media of small wooden cubes and special natural paste is used. I do not know where to buy this paste in England. I have brought some from Gdansk - the capital of amber.
After overnight tumbling in the dry barrel the amber pieces are really shiny and ready to set in jewellery or string to beads. For drilling the amber I use slightly modified twist drill bit. I make it flat on the grinder, during the grinding it gets annealed it is OK, less chance to break it. And angle should be very sharp, the drill bit looks like a sharp cone. The drilling speed must be at least 3000. But higher speed is better. It is important to drill approx 60% of length first then turn the amber bead around and finish drilling from other side, otherwise a crack is almost inevitable. And last job is to set beautiful amber piece into gold or silver. The rubover setting is most popular, but amber may withstand the prong setting too. To make life easier put little bit of epoxy glue on the base of mount. The amber is fossil resin and will perfectly adhere
With epoxy, which is resin too, it will make your setting stronger. After work with pusher some nasty scratches may occur on the amber. You can fix it by polishing already set amber. Please be careful with white amber and silver. The black residue
of silver can contaminate the amber, wash it with warm soap water or turpentine, do not use an ultrasonic or steam. So your wonderful piece of amber jewellery is done, just enjoy it.
