one of my students just won an award for faceting in tuscon and she uses diamond on tin, 13 yr old nadine, and yes eric i too like to use yag for the first stone they cut. have some laser yag— neodymium yttrium aluminum garnet from a maker here in washington and a special reverse brilliant cut that i put them through. takes about 3-5 hrs and they finish going home with an extremely flashy stone and all have polished on a TIN lap with 50,000 that works on all hardness stones. i just polished 80 facets and table. facets took less than 10 min. and table 15.