Lapidary
Overview
The Lapidary Honor is all about turning rough, ordinary-looking rocks into smooth, polished pieces of natural art! You’ll learn how to safely cut, shape, sand, and polish stone while discovering the tools and techniques used by lapidary artists. You’ll take a rough piece of stone and, through careful cutting and polishing, reveal its hidden beauty. By the end, you’ll have created a shiny, finished cabochon and turned it into something you can actually wear or use.
Requirements
1. Name four safety precautions to be taken when sawing rocks.
2. Name two types of diamond saw lubricating and cooling solutions and their purpose.
3. Explain how a diamond saw cuts rocks, how it gets dull, and how it can be sharpened.
4. Describe the five basic steps to follow in bringing a slab or a flat surface to a polish.
5. What important precaution should be taken between each stage of grinding and sanding?
6. What is a template, and how is it used?
7. What is a cabochon, and what is the usual thickness of the slab from which it is made?
8. How do you decide the best angle or position to slab a specimen?
9. Explain two methods of wet sanding while shaping and polishing the rock.
10. From what material are polishing compounds made? If a scratch appears while polishing, how is it removed?
11. Saw, trim, properly dop, and carry a cabochon through the necessary grinding, sanding, and polishing stages to a high gloss or glassy finish.
12. Mount the cabochon on some type of backing, such as a stick pin, sweater pin, key ring, etc., with cement.
Answer key & resources
Master awards
This honor counts toward:
Investiture Achievement
This honor is required, suggested or listed as an option in:
Adapted from AY Honors/Lapidary on the Pathfinder Wiki, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. See the original page's history for its authors.
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