How is Opal mined?

How is Opal mined?

Let’s start by talking about how opal was mined in the late nineteenth century when it all began in Australia.

As opal is not found on the surface, or very rarely, the miner had to dig underground. Opal is found in what is called “opal dirt.” This opal dirt is mostly found under a layer of very hard sandstone.

The first miners simply used picks and shovels. They dug a hole big enough to crawl into and then they kept digging this down until they reached the opal dirt. This hole was called the mine shaft. This could be anywhere from a few metres to twenty metres or more.

Once the level had been found then they would dig horizontally in layers big enough to crawl through. These were called “drives.”

The spoil, or useless material, had to be taken out of the mine so that the miner could move around. So they set up what was called a windlass. This allowed the miner or someone at the top of the mine to turn a handle and bring a bucket to the surface.

For light the miner often simply used a candle. Well, as you can imagine a miner working alone would not get very much done in a day.

What happens today is often not too far removed from those early days. Some hobby miners still use picks and shovels as well as small jackhammers. They use a hoist which takes the bucket of spoil to the surface. A lone miner still cannot do a great deal in a day by himself. It is hard physical work and if a miner works month after month he might not find a single piece of opal worth selling.

The next level of mining is the serious miner. He uses a diesel powered digging machine. Similar to the type of excavation machines used above ground only a bit more compact and specially made for the mining process. To remove the spoil from the mine he will have a machine called a “blower” which actually sucks the spoil up through a pipe to the top of the mine and deposits it into a tip truck which then takes it to a dump site.

This kind of set up will cost $100,000 or more. This is generally used by the serious full time miner hoping to make a living from opal mining.

Then there is the very serious opal miner who uses heavy earth moving machinery such as you find on a construction site and carries out what is called “open cut” mining. This is where a total mine lease of fifty square metres and perhaps twenty metres deep is removed, checked for opal deposits, and then filled back in and rehabilitated.


Why is opal not mined on a huge scale like coal mining is? The answer is because opal is hard to find and almost impossible to predict where it will be found. Entire open cut mining ventures may turn up not a single opal and conversely the lone miner with a pick and shovel might find a million dollars worth in a single morning’s work.

To sink large sums of money in such a haphazard and risky venture is not considered a worthwhile investment for shareholders’ funds so opal mining is left to the adventurous seekers of fortunes who are willing to risk a lot and work hard. Something to think about when admiring your lovely opal jewelry.

Name Necklace. What to Look for When Ordering One

Name necklaces or name pendants as they are also called have been around for at lest forty years that I can remember. The pendants that I saw before my apprenticeship began were mostly worn by very young girls not even teenagers. They were always plated gold and tended to look a little worn as the girls must have liked wearing them often.

They became popular for a good while in the eighties with teenagers and then disappeared for a long period. The huge success of Sex in the City sparked a monstrous comeback for name necklaces of all sorts. I get people asking me every week for a name pendant just like Carrie. Today we are seeing movie stars and television personalities reading the news wearing them.

I resisted many requests to make them until a young single mother of two hounded me for about a month to make them for her sisters.

I make them almost everyday now and they are handmade and very time consuming but the rewards are not just financial as girls and ladies send me emails telling me how much they love them.

If you are getting one made make sure that you ask if it is real gold or gold plated. Gold plating will often wear off as it reacts to acids in the skin and as these pendants are worn high up and touching the skin all the time they are susceptible to this reaction. I make some items which are gold plated but I give a 5 year guarantee with it and the plating is deep. It almost never gets an acid reaction. So be sure to ask about that and guarantees.

The next thing to look for is the thickness of the metal. I use gold plate 1.4mm thick to cut the pendants from. In silver I even use a thicker plate than that as silver is much softer than gold. Now, I see many advertisements for pendants where the thickness is not specified. If you see them ask how thick they are. I see many which are 0.4mm and 0.7mm thick.

This minor thickness has two problems associated with it: firstly, it is just too thin and will bend easily, and secondly, being as thin as a piece of paper means that it lacks dimension. It probably takes me about 40 minutes to hand polish the edges of these pendants and because of that and the thickness of these edges it has a lovely depth to it so that it shines when you look at it from any direction.

The last thing to look at is how the chain is attached to the pendant. I use small rings and I solder the gaps in these rings so that it can never come apart. The quicker way to do this is just to close the gap but it may come apart with a bit of wear. I make them with diamonds, rubies and sapphires.

Opals – Can You Fall in Love with Them.

Yesterday I met an Australian Jeweller in the lift of a specialist jewellery building in Sydney. He asked me what kind of jewellery work I did and I told him that I specialized in opal.

For the last fifteen years he had been making special one off hand pieces for his private customers. In all that time he had never made a piece with opals and asked me how I came to be doing that and more importantly why.

I explained to him that every single opal is different to any other and that was extremely significant. When either of us as jewellers go looking for rubies or sapphires for instance to set in a pendant or ring we spend a good deal of time looking at each stone under magnification so that we can get two or three stones that we need for the piece which are going to be exactly the same in colour and intensity. But that is definitely not the case with opal.

As all opal is unique we are looking for the opposite. We are looking for those individual qualities which set it apart from any other stone. We are looking for that blast of vibrant colour or that intricate pattern or that mass of different colours arranged in their unique form.

I explained to him that as all opal is different and that it comes in several types from different parts of Australia then you must develop a special knowledge to really understand it. Then as a cutter and polisher of these stones I have gained years and years of knowledge of opal’s intricacies from such intimate work with it.

Imagine if you sat down at a bench for a few years and stared intensely with magnified lenses at a particular type of stone and every day you spent hours making decisions as to how to get the very best out of a handful of stones and then spent days cutting them. Well you would develop some expertise with these stones would you not? I asked him how many hours has he spent staring at a single citrine or one single emerald?

Opal is a stone you can fall in love with. I asked him if he could fall in love with other types. Could he fall in love with amethysts or rubies? The answer was no as they are stones which basically all look alike and have no qualities which make you want to examine them for hours on end.

That’s why I love working with opals and making opal jewellery. I love the stone and have a real passion to make a piece of jewelry for this very gemstone that I am working with.

When I make a ring for a ruby the customer might supply a two carat round ruby and I measure the stone from every angle and then I put it aside and I make the piece from gold. I never look at the stone again and I don’t even think about it. When I finish working on the metal then I pick up the ruby and set it into the piece.
But when I make a ring for an opal my whole focus is trying to get the very best from the opal. The stone is never out of site while I am making the metal part. I am constantly picking it up and seeing where it will sit in the piece to make sure that I am not missing something. I keep muttering things like: “My God, this is going to look fantastic!” You could not do that if you did not love the stones.

The White Metals used in Jewellery Making

As an escape from jewellery made with yellow gold we often look for other coloured metals. There is of course rose or pink gold, green gold and green gold as well as some other varieties. However, the traditional other color which has been and still is highly popular is white or silver. Silver is a great color but some people want to see more glitter and silver has that awful negative aspect of tarnishing.

So what are the choices of white? We have silver, white gold, platinum and palladium. These are our major choices today.

Let’s look at Platinum first. It commands the highest price because it is more precious than gold. It is out of most people’s budget today. But is has some wonderful qualities. It can get a fantastic high polish and is a very tough, scratch resistant and tarnish free metal. It can be combined with yellow gold to make a two tone item. In the 18th century Louis the fifteenth considered it the metal fit for a king. South American natives called it Platina or little silver and thought of it as an impurity in their silver. Today it is still on the top of the tree for white jewelry.

Then there is white gold itself. What is white gold? It is an alloy of more than one metal. It starts off as yellow gold as we know gold, and then we mix in bits of other whiter metals until the whole thing turns into a white alloy which we call white gold. White gold looks great and can be combined with yellow gold to make very attractive combinations. It has a downside in that the yellow gold wants to show through. We have a solution for this: we plate the item with another expensive white metal called Rhodium.

Next comes Palladium which is one of the platinum group of metals. It has been used as a jewelry metal since 1939 and is becoming very popular now as gold is becoming so expensive. Why do I think this metal is on the rise? Think about it this way: it is lighter, stronger, cheaper, brighter and more attractive than 18 carat white gold.

Finally let’s come back to Silver. Silver is a cheap precious metal. It is easy to work with and freely available. It is a good alternative to more expensive gold. The disadvantage of silver is that it tarnishes. Well there are two ways around that. The first is common practice and is the same treatment that is used for white gold: we plate it with Rhodium. But today there is an even better alternative. A clever Australian jewellery from Victoria has made an alloy of silver which is still called Sterling Silver which almost does not tarnish. It costs a tiny bit more than normal silver which tarnishes.

My pick of the top end is Palladium and for the bottom end is tarnish resistant silver.

Precious Opal and Common Opal

Opal is made from Silica and water. It is a non crystalline material. Opals are found in several countries around the world. I frequently get people from Russia and Africa wanting to sell me very large quantities of opal but the opal they want to sell me is one color and has very little appeal to me as we can get poor colored opal every day of the week in the Lightning Ridge area of NSW in Australia. We call it potch and it is what is termed common opal. Common opal has no color variation. It may be a dull looking blue or green or gray or white but it has no play of color.

Precious opal is what everyone is searching for. Precious opal has a play of color. Sometimes we call it fire. When you turn a piece of cut and polished opal around in your hand the play of color will be evident. As you move it around the colors change and will go from bright flashes of one color to different looking blasts of other colors.

It was formed mostly in regions which were inland waterways millions of years ago. As these areas weathered silica seeped into groundwater and gradually settled into dried out spheres which cannot be defined even with an ordinary microscope.

Precious opal will be different from one piece to the next. It is rare to find it possible to cut matching pieces from one chunk of opal stone. I have cut many large pieces and couldn’t find two small pieces that I could match into a pair of earrings. That is the beauty of precious opal it is not common and no two pieces are likely to be the same.

Precious opal can be found in many parts of the world but Australia provides about 95 percent of all precious opal mined. It is mined in many parts of Australia but the two types that are recognized as being the best are black opal and white opal. There are sub types of these two such as crystal. Boulder opal is also recognized as precious opal.

It is precious opal which makes the best opal jewelry. Common opal is still useful for making beads and ornaments and low priced jewelry. Precious opal is often just bought by collectors and stored away as pieces for investment and pleasure.

The Jewellers’ Association of Australia’s Annual Fair Sydney 2006 – What’s Hot Around the World?

Thousands of visitors from the Australian jewellery trade, retailers, manufacturers, bench jewellers, goldsmiths, silversmiths attended the annual fair to see the latest products on show from hundreds of exhibitors from all over the world.

There is nothing new under the sun. Well perhaps there isn’t but there certainly can be new twists put on old themes and that is certainly evident in the jewellery fashion world.

The world economies are changing and China is playing a big part in jewellery manufacture and China equals cheap. In Australia sales have been dampened by rising fuel prices, rising interest rates and massively rising gold and silver prices. But it doesn’t mean that people have stopped buying jewellery.

As a response to these negative economic conditions new metals are looming as the popular choice. We are seeing titanium, tungsten, and stainless steel taking over some of the role of the precious metals gold and silver. These are exciting metals and a lot can be done with them that might not be done with other metals. Also, white gold is the most expensive of the gold varieties and with a huge surge in the gold price what can we do? Well palladium is the answer. It is a beautiful metal and is strong and a sparkling white. It doesn’t need to be rhodium plated and in my opinion it looks better than white gold or platinum and it is less expensive.

Big is the word of today. We are seeing huge mens’ watches. At first I have to laugh but then they grow on you. Of course you don’t have to agree with the fashions you just have to keep up with them!

Beads and all things beaded and big beads are popular. Well, that’s been happening for a while but it doesn’t show any signs of waning. Bright coloured beaded jewellery is looming large. The best part about beaded jewellery is that it is cheap. You can buy a lot of it for very little and you can even make it yourself. Beaded gemstone jewellery is raging. I like because you get beads like garnets, pearls, opalite, and so on all very inexpensively. They are the poorer quality pieces of the mining process but what a terrific way to use them.

Diamonds are still in flavour which is evidenced by the fact that one and a half million dollars worth were stolen from one exhibitor as his wears were being transported to the fair. Diamonds are coming in all colours now and this is making a resurgence in the desire for the timeless stone.

Other gemstones are being set in invisible settings and this is becoming very popular. All that glittering metal which traditionally holds the stones in place is cleverly being replaced by another form of setting which makes the setting method invisible. I like it.

Silver jewellery is surging as a response to the increased cost of white gold but it always had its loyal followers in any case.

I am pleased to see that amber and amber jewellery from the far Baltic shores is still very popular.

All in all, my view of what I have seen and talked about shows that all the old favourites like opals are still holding their ground but big, bright, glitzy jewellery is on the rise!

My Gold Jewellery – Is it worth more Today?

As I write gold is worth about $630 US an ounce. Since August 2005 the price of gold has risen from $447 US which represents a whopping 43% increase.

So yes, your jewellery must be worth a little more if it is made of gold. Silver too has increased a good deal.
However, don’t forget that the gold in your jewellery is made from an alloy of gold. That means that other, usually less costly metals, are mixed in with the pure gold to make its carat.

Chinese people like to buy jewellery made from 24 carat gold and some folks from the Arabic counties prefer 22 carat gold, but the rest of the world likes 9 carat which is the most used in Australia and a good deal in England, 14 carat and 18 carat which is used in the USA and Europe.

Let’s have a look at the factors that are important to the price of your jewellery. If your gold jewellery is made from nine carat yellow gold then it only has 37.5 percent gold in it, if it is 14 carat then it only has 58.5 percent real gold in it.

Now understand that an average ladies ring might have 2.5 grams of gold in it and at current retail rates that gold content might be worth say, $30 per gram. So if gold went up a further 50% then the gold in your ring won’t go up 50% because it is an alloy and not pure gold, and there is only a small bit of gold in the ring so your $600 ring might be worth another $30 or so.

Jewellery is priced on not just the cost of the gold content and the cost of even the precious stones but also the difficulty to manufacture it, and the design and the brand name of the manufacturer.

Gary Hocking is an Australian manufacturing jeweller and has his own website http://www.jewelleryexpress.com.au He will make that special piece of jewellery just for you. Ask him about custom jewellery work. You may copy and distribute this article as long as you use the bio and live link to his website.