Why wax and epoxy?

I found that reliably attaching gemstones to dops was one of the most difficult, frustrating, and unreliable aspects of faceting. There has been lots of discussion, both pragmatic and dogmatic, of the relative merits of wax, epoxy, cyano-acrylate (crazy) glue, etc. etc. I followed these debates with an open mind, and I tried almost everything... several colours of wax, many types of epoxies, and several different crazy glue formulations. Each method has its own benefits and difficulties, which I summarize in the table below (and please note that this represents my personal opinion and experience - I generally try to avoid discussions about religion, politics, and dopping...).

Which dopping technique is best? The short answer (in my humble opinion) is none of the above. I learned with wax, but it has the serious shortcoming of limited accuracy - no matter what I tried, I never managed to achieve accurate centering. For smaller (read expensive) rough, a de-centering of even 0.25 mm (approximately 0.01 inch) can result in a yield reduction of 30%. See here for a discussion of the importance of accurate dopping. Epoxy, on the other hand, suffers from the major disadvantage of difficult release, especially from cone dops. For whatever reason, I had very little success with various cyano-acrylates, even after sealing the bond with transparent nail polish.

After some experimentation, I have come up with an approach that combines the best of the wax and epoxy techniques, while sharing few of their shortcomings. Follow the tutorial below to see how it's done.