How long does it take to cut a diamond?

[matthewk]

Starting from a rough how long in actual labor manhours does it take to turn out a well cut finished product?

 

[RockDoc]

This depends on the quality of the rough diamond. If someone is cutting an Imperfect, low color diamond, the effort spent in comparison to a large very valuable piece of rough is also paramount as well. Eveytime the stone is placed on the cutting wheel material is ground away. Generally very skilled cutters will only place the stone on the cutting disk, for a second or two, and then they look at it by eye many thousands of times during the process.

Some diamonds "cut like butter", other are very troublesome. Some diamonds just cut the way you want them to, others are stubborn, brittle, have stress which takes a lot of extra time.

Also the skill of the person cutting the diamond has affect on this as well.

Just saying "well cut" is sort of broad too. The more precisely proportioned a diamond is does have some direct bearing on the time spent facetting it.

There are diamonds cut for the regularly commercial cut stones, that take just a few hours, the exceptionally well proportioned stones can take 20-40 hours ( which includes planning, girdling, blocking, brillianteering and grading ). But sometimes a cutter runs into a very stubborn facet that won''t take a polish, that requires a lot of tweaking to get it right with the problem of having to "fudge" with the angles to get a polish on the facet with an angle that is within accepted grading parameters for its resultant cut grading. As cut grading gets more detailed and requires more attention cutters will have to put more effort into this.

Rockdoc