Polishing Myanmar (Burmese) amber

[Mousehead]

I have 1kg of rough Burmese amber stones ready to polish but I'm a little stumped as to where to start.  I've polished Dominican pieces before using a dremel and wet sandpaper with success, but this stuff is older and much harder.  In addition to the thin rough skin on these pieces, a lot have rock (or some combination of amber/earth) running through them making it difficult to figure out the plan of attack in regard to finding inclusions and getting a nice shine.  Anyone here have experience with this?

[Randyw]

@holdinghistory polishes a lot of Burmese amber. Let’s see what he has to say.

[holdinghistory]

I usually polish everything by hand, with various grits of wet/dry sandpaper and water. I would start with a course grit on this one and work it down into the shape you want. Then just go through the grits like you usually would and do your final polish. If you start out around 400 grit, that should help shaping. Be careful not to go too far though, since all the finer grits will still take a bit off to get down to the final polish.

[holdinghistory]

Looks like you got a nice size piece there! Have you backlit any of them to see if you can spot any inclusions? If not, I would do that first to make sure you don't burn anything out.

[Mousehead]

Thanks @holdinghistory!  I've got a whole kilogram bag with hundreds of large pieces ready to polish and I'm slowly going through them with a bright light to see if any inclusions are immediately visible in the clearer pieces without any skin.  I suspect the ones I can't see through yet will yield the fun stuff  

 

How do you deal with the large swaths of solid dark stuff running through some of these? The third photo is a good example - the dark parts seem to go so deep in the amber (or sometimes all the way through) that polishing won't really help reveal anything.  Do you just cut or completely sand those parts off?  I haven't seen that feature in the Dominican amber I've polished and it's frustrating!

[holdinghistory]

26 minutes ago, Mousehead said:

How do you deal with the large swaths of solid dark stuff running through some of these? The third photo is a good example - the dark parts seem to go so deep in the amber (or sometimes all the way through) that polishing won't really help reveal anything.  Do you just cut or completely sand those parts off?  I haven't seen that feature in the Dominican amber I've polished and it's frustrating!

 

I typically just take it into consideration and work it into the piece. Most often, if I can, I use it as a base where I will polish it flat to be free standing, and turn it into a built in display. I would guess you could also use a diamond cutoff blade for a dremel tool and cut it off as well, but I have not tried it myself.

[Mousehead]

That's great advice, thanks dude.  I'll post whatever cool stuff I find in this massive pile.

[holdinghistory]

My pleasure! Look forward to seeing what you find!