World Of Gems Conference 2017 Proceedings Book

WORLD OF GEMS CONFERENCE V - 21 - SEPTEMBER 2017 M ost of us who have worked in the jewellery industry with loose gem- stones in one form or another seem to end up with what will be fa- miliar to many of you; a box, usually a biscuit tin, sweet jar or similar container, full of stones removed from scrap jewellery, bought in or otherwise surplus to requirements. We have all had the very best intentions to re-use, reset, parcel, polish, identify or in some way make money from them. Rather what happens is the container, mine was an ice cream tub, sits there for years on end with the vow that one day you will do something with it. However, for years now, I have identified, valued and sold real and metaphorical ice cream tubs on a small and huge scale with great success and a large revenue. Unless you are in the fortunate position of having a box full of stones that are clean, when dealing with stones from scrap it is unusual for them not to be encrusted with the previous owner’s “life”(!), the process starts with cleaning the stones. This can be achieved with a remarkably unsophisticated method, simply tip them in batches into an ultrasonic, and let them buzz and bubble away for an hour or so with some household detergent. Then scrub them with a toothbrush, lay them out on kitchen towels, and dry them off. There are more sophisticated methods, but this works, is next to free and most people have the equipment on hand to do this. Once you have clean stones, you need to decide what to do with them. Gen- erally, the decision is to make the most money from them you can. Unless you specifically want to build an inventory of usable jobbing stones or teach- ing stones, imitations, synthetics, treated material or very low-cost material, is essentially residue and needs to be stripped out. Usually what makes the most money are: diamonds, larger better quality single stones (ruby, sap- phire, emerald, tourmaline, spinel etc.), parcels of mixed sizes and qualities of identified commercial gemstones (including the above and beryls, zircons, garnets, opals etc.), in about that order. The process I use is not a gemmo- logical process, it is a commercial process using gemmology. The objective is to be efficient essentially pulling out what you don’t want quickly to con- centrate your time on what you do. Diamonds are where the most money is, so I start there. Start by stripping out all the “colourless” stones, (essentially anything diamond-like (colourless, or typical diamond colours pale yellow, brown etc.). Then you need to check each stone with a loupe. Diamond imitations are quick and easy to spot using observation, and get pulled out. If you would like, you can use a commercial tester as long as you use a dual version that also checks for synthetic moissanite, but in my experience this is slower and less accurate than some- one who can identify by eye. If you have large enough quantities of small di- amonds you can submit them to a tender sale, like Rapaport’s monthly TREASURE FROM TRASH – IDENTIFYING THE VALUE IN GEMSTONES REMOVED FROM SCRAP Kerry Gregory, FGA, DGA TREASURES ABSTRACT FIGuRE 1. FIGuRE 2. FIGuRE 3.