I have a small amount of vintage facet grade garnet that was my dads. He bought it about forty plus years ago from Africa, I believe East Africa. It's very dark, and when held up to the light looks either almost an amethyst color or else a deep true red, or some combination of the two depending upon how it is turned. Other jewelers who use more faceted material in their designs told me this is very collectable material now and commands high prices as the mine was tapped out long ago. I was about to cab it all, but I was advised to put aside the two biggest pieces with most purply color and to have them faceted in the future and have fun with the rest. The problem is that literally any amount of pressure seems to fracture this stuff, even when I use plenty of water. I had actually given the biggest piece to a friend who facets and he told me it looked spectacular and he got it all the way to polish stage and then the thing split nearly in two. My cabs have all splintered on the edge or broken in half. Was it mined poorly, by blasting or something? In the 40 years I have had this material rough, it has not developed any visible flaws or fractures in its raw state. It looks perfect ... and then falls apart. The sad thing is that the portion of the stone that doesn't shatter looks spectacular, perfect, incredibly shiny and with amazing deep color. But every piece I tried developed terrible flaws in cutting and I've gone through over a third of it. Any thoughts? Do I just treat it like it's made of cotton and take a couple hours a stone (no pressure at all with tons of water) and see if that works? I have no real trouble with turquoise or rhodochrosite, but even that stuff can take some amount of pressure and friction. This is frustrating because this stuff looks so beautiful and yet somehow doesn't come through. I do note that though it looks as clean as can be, none of it seems to show the original faces of the crystal, which again makes me think maybe it was blasted out of the rough?
