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Post#1 @
05-01-01
, 08:42 AM
My wife and I just spent the better part of last Friday with Brian Gavin, proprietor of Alpha. What a great experience! We had viewed a really nice pair of SuperbCerts last February, and since my wife has ties to Houston it only made sense to check out A Cut Above. We started out with particular target sizes in mind, but one of the objectives of this trip given my engineer's take on things was to make fairly constant the most important variable when selecting diamonds - cut - then to vary size and color within the VS/SI clarity range in order to see what made the most pleasing combination for a three-stone ring.
I won't be writing a miniseries  , but wanted to make just a couple of observations:
At this highest level of the art, we didn't have a preference between stones scoring 1.1 and 2.7 on the HCA. We had requested in advance a range of stones to view, and without knowing for sure which one was which, we selected the two that happened to score the lowest (1.1) and the highest (2.7) as our favorites. But just choosing at all was tough, and there really were no clear winners.
A lot has been said here about precision cuts. We saw some extremely tight numbers for the stones we ran Sarin manufacturers reports on. I've included Sarins for two of the stones we liked the best.
And finally, we got a preview of Brian's paper about the importance of the hearts pattern as an indication of precision cutting. It includes lots of background material on what's going on optically and from a production standpoint to get the h&a pattern. Good stuff! I'm not quite sure when he plans to make this available since he's been asked to consider submitting it for publication in a trade journal, and wants to make additions to it as a result.
Diamondbob had originally planned to meet with us but ended up needing to be out of town, so Brian graciously took care of us instead with the only interruption being a call about plans to tweak and resubmit a fifteen carat D-IF pear shaped stone to attempt to get a flawless grade instead. Wow! He did a great job balancing the technical presentation for me with my wife's desire to have fun and see some great diamonds. Having the master cutter's perspective not just a sales and gemological presentation was just fantastic. Highly recommended.
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