This week Rod explains the ins and outs about Mintabie Opal. Where is Mintabie, what opal comes from this area and what is the opal material like in its rough form. Rod goes into depth about the different kinds of opal that comes from this area and explains why the variations of opal coming from Mintabie occurs.     Podcast | Download | BuzzSprout | iTunes The story of the show… Every Thursday morning, 8AM EST, we do our best to produce a show that highlights the realities of being in the opal business. Lets get familiar as to where Mintabie is in relation to the other opal fields. Mintabie sits west of the Stuart highway and 1000km NW of Adelaide, South Australia. Its approximately 200km south of the NT border also.     Here are some photos of rough Mintabie opal material. Notice the hard exterior around the color seams, this is quite tough material to cut and takes serious amount of time and expertise to process Mintabie opal.

To give you a better idea about how large each piece of rough opal from Mintabie is, here is a handful of rough Opal in my hands. This material is the lower 20% of the parcel that we purchased, this is by far the most time consuming and difficult end of the parcel to process into good cut opals.	Each piece of Opal goes through several grading processes even before being cut. We need to make sure there is a visible seam of color in order to begin the sawing and sanding process. Take a look as we inspect the rough Mintabie opal with a jewelers 10x loupe.

Here are the different types of opal the Mintabie opal mines produce including crystal opal, white opal, semi black opal, black opal, opal doublet (from crystal opal).

Crystal Opal	White Opal	Semi Black Opal	Black Opal	Opal Doublet

This material is probably some of the toughest materail to cut through, its hard on the sawing disks, grinding wheels and takes chunks off Rod's fingers during the cutting. The results speak for themselves through. See our video below as to learn how to cut this opal from an expert. Be guided through step by step as Rod takes a small part of our opal parcel and processes it right in front of your eyes.