How to Stabilize Rocks Using a Vacuum Cactus Juice Resin (for Lapidary)

For many lapidaries, you may have some rock slabs with fractures or crumbly material that is beautiful, but needs a little help in order to keep it together so you can actually cut and dome it into a cabochon to be used in jewelry.

Stabilizing slabs is done by filling up all of those fractures with some kind of epoxy or resin.

While there are many ways of stabilizing, the method I’m going over today is cactus juice resin stabilization which requires the use of a little toaster oven to “bake” it. If you’re working with a material that you don’t think will be able to handle the heat, either test a small amount of the material first or try a different method since truly the method you pick will be determined by what material you’re using or what outcome you want.

A lot of other methods of stabilizing rock slabs don’t penetrate the slab deep enough to make it workable once you start cutting. What I like about the cactus juice resin stabilization is that because the resin cures with heat, you can soak and vacuum it for a long time so that the resin really gets down deep into the slab.

You may even decide to stabilize, then cut some, then stabilize again as more layers of the stone are exposed. There are a lot of options to go about stabilizing but this is the method I tried out and had success with for these particular projects.

Check out my tutorial on how to do it on my lapidary YouTube channel here: