Volume I, Number 9	Carol J. Bova, Editor.    Web Publishing by Doppler FX.	08/01/97

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Russian Diamond Grit at the German Kitchen Table (continued from July) by Hans Durstling Once I had encountered the Polish Market treasure trove I of course became a regular. Every Saturday morning my friend Oliver (yes, he was, and is, a goldsmith, and lapidary) and I would pilgrimage to the Market, eagerly scanning the adjacent parking lot to see how many buses from Poland were there this time. By dint of regular sign language conversations each Saturday, little by little we got to "know" some of the people. With the aid of a Polish speaking acquaintance I managed to query one of the vendors. His name was Stephan. He'd been a welding inspector at the Gdansk shipyard, and now was out of work. If I recall correctly his unemployment insurance amounted to about eighty dollars a month. His wife, a teacher earned 150 dollars. Now, this was how he helped make a living. It was he who told me about the fourteen hour bus trip to get to Dortmund, about sleeping in the bus, getting harassed (not surprisingly, considering the nature of the merchandise) at the border by customs officials, and about going on buying trips to similar flea markets in Russian towns and Polish towns near the Russian border. He'd been a living witness to the collapse of his entire social system, with all its cradle to grave certainties, and of the economy that went with it. It was rough, he agreed, to have to start over, to improvise an existence as a kind of travelling peddler gypsy. And yet while rueful, he was not bitter. "It will take a long time ," he said. "Probably many years. But in America, democracy did not come in one night either." A father and son team of vendors usually near the entrance to the market had tiny diamond tube drills, Polish amber with flies in it, hemostats and other useful articles. We both bought amber, but Oliver was particularly on the lookout for Russian alexandrite. That took some explaining and writing the name down in all the languages we knew. To no avail. While much of the technological stuff had been produced to fill quotas and warehouses, the tradition with gemstones was quite different. They'd always been seen as hard currency earners, high value then and high value now, and so were not likely to end up in a flea market economy. By drawing a sketch of a little salt shaker with grains of salt falling out to form a pile and saying, "Diamant. Diamant," I for my part requested the father and son team to keep an eye out for diamond grit. "Aha." They got the message. But, alas, no diamond grit. You could get tubes of diamond paste though, in various colours of grease: blue and yellow and green. The tubes were like the toothpaste tubes of 1949, lead or maybe tin foil. The female thread on their polyethylene caps bore little relation to the male thread on the ends of the tubes. The caps fell off almost instantly, the bottom seams leaked paste, particularly in warm weather when the stuff turned as liquid as butter in sunshine. That in turn impregnated the labels with oil, so these fell off. But that didn't matter so much because they were in Cyrillic and we couldn't read them anyway. By putting tiny dabs of paste on my finger, drawing it across a polished copper plate and looking at the resulting scratches under a microscope I concluded that the blue stuff was probably about 2,500 grit and the yellow substantially finer. The blue stuff left a stone still slightly cloudy while the yellow shone it up glass clear. But I really wanted the coarser stuff, 100 to 200 grit. Oliver bought a heavy 12 inch horizontal steel wheel bearing a thick raised rim of diamond impregnated soft metal. We thought it might do for roughing cuts in faceting and built it into an old solid kitchen table where it wobbled a bit but it certainly did cut. The diamonds in that rim would last for a generation or more. But I still didn't have any coarse grit. Finally I bought the coarsest looking diamond wheel I could find, the diamonds in phenolic compound around the outside of a thick aluminum hub. This wheel was unfortunately rounded on the working surface, such that holding a stone against it would have cut a groove about the profile of the tip of my thumb. So the challenge was to get the diamonds out. I knew that diamonds are not particularly sensitive to heat. As it happened, the smaller heating elements on the apartment kitchen stove in Dortmund were just exactly the diametre of my newly acquired wheel. So, setting the wheel on the stove element, I turned it on "high" and opened the window for ventilation. It stank a bit and generated a good deal of smoke. When that subsided, I figured the wheel was about as hot as it was going to get, picked it up with pliers and threw it into a sink full of water, where the thermal shock cracked the phenolic off the hub in the form of two diamond bearing sickle moons. It'd kind of hoped the whole thing would fall into powder, but it didn't. Presumably I hadn't heated it long enough to burn out the phenolic entirely, or maybe there was other stuff mixed in with it. With a pair of pliers I then broke the phenolic sickle moons into more manageable chunks and burnt these individually in a crucible using a torch. Now the stuff crumbled easily. Gently I crushed it to a powder in the mortar. The result was a mix of phenolic ash and diamond grit. The problem was how to separate the one from the other. Flotation with water and a drop of detergent in a beaker didn't work. The phenolic ash, if that's what it was, looking like gritty black soot, sank to the bottom right along with the diamond. Gravity separation by panning in water didn't work either. The stuff that flowed over the rim of the pan still sparkled: I was losing diamond that way. So, carefully recovering my grit from the beaker and the waste water pot with the aid of a coffee filter, I let the grit mix dry and made one last attempt at separation, pouring the dry grit, as I mentioned at the beginning of this story, from one salad bowl into another while a breeze from the kitchen window blew through the stream of powder. It seemed to be more effective than any other method, yet it still wasn't perfect...there were sparkles still among the fine dust that came to rest on the kitchen floor. And that was the end of my kitchen technology resources. I couldn't figure out what else I could do to clean and separate the grit from the soot and ash. Still can't. Chances are the contaminant may be largely carbon. So is the diamond. How do you separate carbon from carbon? Beats me. The upshot of the experiment is a glass jar of diamond and contaminant mix. Looking at it under the microscope, I'd say it's about 90 percent diamond, and by the scratches it leaves it's probably about 150 to 180 grit size. I've used some and given some away, but originally it weighed 250 carats, as weighed on my primitive little goldsmith's balance - ten dollars, at the Polish Market. Copyright, 1997 by Hans Durstling Hans Durstling is a freelance writer, jewellery maker and stone cutter living in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, near the zeolite, agate and amethyst collecting areas on the Bay of Fundy. His stories, reviews and commentaries have appeared in Canadian Geographic Magazine, The European, Toronto Globe & Mail, Canadian Mineralogist, Mineralienwelt, Rock & Gem and many others. He now works primarily in corporate & industrial writing explaining complex scientific and technical products and processes to layman readers, and writing & narrating corporate & technical videos. A considerable portion of his time is taken up with the constant battle to keep minerals and gems ("the hobby that got out of control") from taking over entirely. Hans can be reached at sinico@nbnet.nb.ca.

Editor's Note: Any suggestions from our readers? We'll print your ideas in the next issue. Just send them to eclectic@bovagems.com. If you missed Part One, go to the Archives.