Dopping cement
thermal adhesive used by gem cutters
Dopping cement, dopping wax, or faceting wax is a thermal adhesive used by gem cutters to secure ("dop") a gemstone to a wooden or metal holder ("dopstick", "Tounded stick") for grinding and lapping. Setters cement is a similar material used to secure a gemstone while setting or polishing.
Dopping cement is usually formulated so that it is hard at room temperature, but soft and moldable like putty at 45-65 °C, when it can still be shaped with the fingers. The cement is commercially sold as sticks or flat slabs.
With metal dopsticks, a low-melting tin-lead solder can be used for that purpose, instead of a dopping cement.
Use
In typical use, a small amount of cement is melted from the tip of a cement stick or from the edge of a cement slab by holding it over an alcohol lamp or similar source of heat.
The tip of the dopstick is dipped into the molten cement, which is allowed to cool until it has the consistency of putty. The stone too is separately warmed up to about the same temperature. Then the dopstick is pressed down over the stone, and the cement is pressed with the fingers so as to tightly enclose it, except for the part that is to be ground or polished.
Alternatively, the stone may be warmed up to that temperature, and a few drops of molten cement can be dropped over it.
The public source identifies “Dopping cement” as thermal adhesive used by gem cutters. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dopping, cement and thermal.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dopping cement” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.