so stands in der Zeitung...
Supersized sapphire
Man hoping
8 0, OOO-carat stone gets him into record book
BY CHRISTINA cUPO RECORD STAFF WRITER
y 'am
CONOVER
Richard Sipe owns a big
rock. A 35-pound, 80,000-carat , sapphire to be exact.
Sipe says when he acquired the rock from. a fellow gem lover in North Carolina, it weighed 63 pounds. He spent several years whittling it down with diamonds to carve the multicolored ('tone.
Sipe also plans to make a claim to the Guinness Book of Records that his rock is the largest sapphire ever cut and polished.
"The one in the records now is 60,000 carats," Sipe said. "I'm planning on bumping him."
The sapphire is on display today and Sunday at the 35th annual Unifour Gem & Mineral & Jewelry Show at the Hickory Metro Convention Center.
Sipe, 78, has been digging for sapphires for a half-century. A stonemason by trade, he developed a passion for rooting around Conover and finding stones so hard he couldn't break them with an ax. That's when Sipe knew he was on to something special.
He taught himself to carve sapphires an,d jade' almost 30 years ago.
On the outside, a sapphire looks just like a regular rock, but it's heavy, Sipe said. His stone weighs about as much