It’s been awhile, again. But quite a few things have happened too, again.

First off there are 2 engravings that I’d like to share with you. A solid brass Zippo, made for ‘proof of concept’ to see how engrave able it is and maybe offer it for selling in some shops. Zippo design is what I might call classical American design- if you look at American engraved weapons they mostly have this kind of scrolls.

Here’s the eye candy:

And here is extreme close up of the engraving, which shows about 2cm of area from lower left corner:

Second engraving I did was on a folding knife. It was especially made to ‘show off’ engraving, hence the plain stainless steel handle. For this design I got inspiration from Steve Lindsay engravings, a guy whose style and skill I really admire. This style usually doesn’t use any spirals like in American, English and other styles and has large leaves with lots and lots of shading. Time spent on design was 1 day, cutting took about 3.5 days, but I think was quite worth it.

Oh, and both of these engravings were made with Lindsay engraver, which I think is extremely good for doing super-fine shading.

Now the microscope saga.

There’s this joke about government and it’s practices: “We’re dealing with this – papers are lost. We’re dealing with this actively – we’re looking for papers.” Exactly this happened when I ordered new Lindsay engraver and microscope. I got the engraver just fine – shipping was about 3 days from US to here with FedEx and 30 minutes of filling out customs papers.

But the fun began with scope. On 2nd of Sept they mail me and ask for microscope invoice, I sent it at same day. Then I wait 2 weeks to get my stuff. During this time I call customs about 5 times and each time they say that there’s 1.5 to 2 weeks of queue in filling out the forms… OK, no problem.

Then I get the second note that they need invoice for scope… What the…?

I send it and call – yes, they received it, filled the forms and sent the package out. Lo! and behold, indeed the next day I get my heavy package.

But…

There’s no fsck’ing microscope there, only the stand. After few calls to postal service, to guy in the customs who filled the form, to customs director and to customs secretary (that was how I got forwarded) it came out that actually there were 2 packages and one is still in customs. So I send ’em email with all the data of how much I paid, the serial numbers and whatnot. I call. Yes, they got it. Yes, they’ll send it out.

I wait 2 days…

I make another round of calls to form filler, secretary who suggest that I should try to call to warehouse.

And here comes word to word quote from warehouse gal: “That package? Hmm, let me see. No, it’s not here. Maybe I’ll call you back?”. Forward 2 hours I get the call: “Hello. Yes, the package is on its way now. What was the problem? It seems that papers were lost…”.

I got the microscope next day…

Here’s a little overview of how one engraving is done. Of course there are many ways to achieve the same result, but this is what I use and it works for me.

This engraving was done for a DVD box that was a gift for a couple whose wedding photographer I was.

First off me and my dad brainstormed about 3 hours how to make the box. First idea was to make usual rectangular box, but we just couldn’t find a way to put the discs safely there and we definitely didn’t want to use any plastic parts for DVD holders. The problem was also that I had to fit 3 discs there. We tried to come up with a way to modify plastic boxes that hold 4 discs, but nothing was really good… Finally we came up with the simplest solution – circular tower. It was the easiest to build and probably looks most elegant too. Dad went off to build the box out and veneer it, I started to work on engraving design.

Design process usually starts with scanning the detail I want to engrave, in this case 12cm DVD disc, getting the contour lines in Photoshop and printing it out as big as possible, so I’ll have enough room to draw my scrolls and leaves. Then starts the creative process with pencil and lots and lots of eraser. I still rely heavily on the design book, it takes time and practice to learn it…

Drawing the design for this piece took about 4 hours, but I believe it will shorten as my skills improve. Fortunately this detail is symmetrical so I could draw only one side and later mirror-copy that to the other side. After drawing is finished with pencil it is redraw it with black pen, then I erase the pencil lines and the scan the drawing again.

In photoshop I copy the design to the other side, enhance levels and whatnot, mirror the whole design, resize to correct size and print out several copies with laser printer so they can be transferred to the piece. Transferring is done with acetone on damp paper towel – I place the design face down (hence the mirroring in PS) on the metal plate and apply acetone to the backside. This effectively melts the toner on the paper and transfers it to the metal. On this photo the right side is already cut and left side shows toner marks.

After the main lines are engraved it’s ready for shading and background treatment, both are very time consuming. Shading means just adding lots and lots of fine lines to the leaves that will give 3D look. For this project the background was stippled, which means just ‘destroying’ the negative space areas with needle-point tool.

Here’s the stippling tool attached to graver and the brass plate on vise:

This is a close up where you can really see the shading and one part where background is already stippled:

And this is the final result:

All in all this project took about 3.5 working days to complete and I’m quite satisfied with, as was the bride who got it as gift. I’m sure I’ve never done anything that beautiful during my programming career… This all is quite satisfying.

Again it’s been a while since my last post, but do believe me, I’ve not wasted my time. Actually most of the time after engraving class in Antwerp I’ve been engraving. 2-3 days after the class we used for building a workplace and necessary tools to start engraving – table, vise, sharpener and so on and after that – engraving, engraving, engraving. It has been very interesting and I can see my own progress advancing with every piece I do. Soon I’ll try to make a little overview of the whole process, but right now here are 2 knives that are made by my dad and engraved by me.

This knife is engraved using relief engraving technique – very time consuming but also very attractive. The engraving alone took about 7 days of work.

Here’s a little close-up of relief engraving:

This next knife has much simpler engraving and one side took about 10-12 hours to complete: