Mother of pearl advice needed.

I have never worked with mother pearl before. I bought some for inlay projects and I want to make a pair of earrings for my daughter for xmas.

I have watched some videos on cutting it but need some advice on drilling it. I will need to drill couple small holes close to the top edge to attach the gold wires.

Any tips on drilling would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Use diamond dental drills, and keep the drill flushed with water. The dust is not to be inhaled. That's true for all lapidary cutting and drilling - keep flushed with water, so no dust is airborne.

I use solid carbide end mills and drills (available on ebay as surplus from circuit board manufacturers for a tiny fraction the price of new) in a foredom tool. MOP dust is nasty, keep it wet if you can, wear a HEPA mask and HEPA vacuum to clean up.

+1 on diamond bit, and +1,000,000 on not breathing the dust. Please take this very seriously- it's very nasty stuff and you don't want to breathe it. Fortunately my supplier warned me of this years ago when I first started doing shell inlays.

Thanks for all of the tips guys. I do have a nice filter to wear.

Nice thing about the tiny diamond dremel bits is that you can enlarge to any radius by side milling.