Hello and welcome.
My name is Brian Konecke and I'm a senior
year, geology major at Augustana College.
I'm here
in Chanthaburi, Thailand as an
invitation by my college and
associates to
take a look into spinel
heat treating process, but in the meantime,
I will show you around the office,
the rough room, and sooner or later
we'll head downtown to the gem market and check
out what's going on down there.Welcome to
the office. I wanna take you through
the rough room, as I call it. There are literally kilos and kilos
of rough here. In particular
some other rough that I'm actually
working with for the spinel
experiments and heat treating is the mahengae rough.
It comes from Tanzania, Africa some really
nice spinel. The only problem with it is typically lots of
inclusions of silk that makes it very
difficult to work. Which is
partially why I'm here to help solve the
mystery of dissolving the silk
and bringing out the best we possibly can
from the spinel from
the mehangae region in Tanzania. Here we are up in the office right now,
I'll show you around a little bit.
This is the cut room, where they cut and process with some of the rough.
a specialty Werner is very good at. Over here
we have Michael who is deciding on which
fancy sapphire he would like to purchase. And this is the project that I'm working on currently.
This is the heat treating of spinel.
And you can see different temperatures
produce different results.
He's the man. He's going over and
color sorting some of the gems there. And
there's
Werner processing some rough. So here we
are
first day in Chanthaburi. First time
at the gem market. People sitting around
white tables,
buying, selling, and trading gems
on this street here. Back at the office
after a long and
eventful day. Now it's time to get
back to work. Thanks for watching.
