by Nancy Gardiner
Northern News Services

NNSL (June 2/97) - Diamond-cutters are a rare breed. So it's a great surprise to find one in Yellowknife.

But the city had a visitor -- Morten Flygel. He's with Polar Star Diamonds Ltd. of Edmonton. He's one of only 30 diamond-cutters in Canada and this was his first trip to the NWT.

With chin-length wisps of straight blond hair often shadowing his face, his bold eyes remain transfixed on a cast-iron wheel as it spins at high speed.

Diamond-cutting is a 600-year-old craft and nothing much has changed except that the cutting wheel is now electric.

The chisel is an old art, too, but there are only a few who still use it. Flygel opts for the more modern set up.

Flygel takes a 3.5-carat diamond (a little bigger than the end of a Bic pen) in his special cutting device. He wipes a two-centimetre band of olive oil and diamond dust onto the wheel. It's actually the diamond dust that cuts the diamond. He quickly touches the diamond to the wheel in a claw-like device, and pulls it back up quickly. Ceramic glue holds the diamond in place.

He's aiming for brilliancy -- the way the light shines through the diamond. Altogether, he will cut 58 facets.

Flygel says his normal day is usually eight to 10 hours long. He grips the metal arm holding the diamond, barely touches it to the wheel, then examines it through an eyepiece. This step is repeated quickly over and over again, his hair flying about in front of his face like a maestro.

Gazers in the crowd ask how he can do that all day.

He replies: "It's like meditation. You can get lost in thought for hours -- it's like being in a tunnel."

He then cuts some more. Cut, look, cut, look. The measurements are precise -- the points must meet up symmetrically.

"The diamond is like a person," says Flygel. Each has its own character and each is different.

It took Flygel three years of training to become a diamond-cutter. He studied to become a doctor, and passed his subjects, but decided on diamond-cutting instead.

"It takes 10 years to be a master-cutter," he says, looking up from his wheel to a gathering crowd in the corridor of the Explorer Hotel.

Flygel, is originally from Narvik, in northern Norway. He speaks Norwegian, Italian and English.

He's seen polar bears, and eaten seal and whale in his own country, so he tried muskox here in Yellowknife but thought it would take getting used to. He's also driven dog teams in Norway and was hoping to find some in Yellowknife.

He talks about what it's like in other parts of the world. He lived for a year in Florence, Italy, and loved it very much. There, gem merchants have little booths that jut out over a bridge, he says.

He then talks about New York. It's like an assembly line there. Two hundred machines move around to the cutters, yet there may only be four cutters on the job. Another gem expert visiting Yellowknife, Warren Boyd, says he has to travel all the way to Antwerp to buy diamonds. That's the way the market works. He would like to see Canada keep its natural resources in Canada. Boyd is a rough diamond valuator with a consulting firm in Toronto.

It's clear this is a global business and unique that Yellowknife had a glimpse of it.

Roger Morton, also of Polar Star Diamonds, says Canada should try to ensure diamond cutting becomes a secondary industry to BHP's diamond mine.

Otherwise, he says, the resources will go elsewhere.