Posts Tagged Engraving
Types of Engraver (Manual)
(Context: I’ve been involved in the trophy and engraving industry for around three years. I make no claim to know it all, or even know a lot. When I first became involved I searched the Internet looking for information that I’d find useful in helping me understand the industry – I didn’t find much. This is my small part in hoping that the next person in my shoes can find something useful to them. If I’ve gotten something wrong, please leave a comment so I can correct it.)
Manual Engraver:
A manual engraver lets you lay out the letters you want to engrave in a tray. The letters are made up of grooves in brass. A manual engraver uses a probe that runs through this groove. Attached, through a series of lever arms, is a diamond tip that repeats anything the probe does on the surface of what you’re engraving.
The process requires you to manually set the pressure that the diamond tip exerts on your engraving surface. That means you need to keep steady pressure to get a good consistent result. One trap is that if you aren’t careful the probe can jump out of the groove resulting in the diamond tip also going where it wasn’t intended. Time for a re-do.
Nobody tells you… (fonts)
Three years ago I’d never given any real thought to the actual process of engraving. Sure, I’d had things engraved before but even then I hadn’t really thought about what goes into the “back room” handling.
Perhaps this is because I’d never really been exposed to anything except hand operated engravers (either the Dremel style of tool or it’s more commercial bretheren) or an occassional manual pantograph style engraver where choices of engraving styles were fairly limited anyway.
One huge realisation was dealing with fonts.
Wonderful World of Engraving
We purchased the trophy and engraving business from it’s previous owners about three years ago. Included in that purchase was the engraver they were using – an old-ish Gravograph IM3 manual pantograph engraver. Even today, this engraver still gets some use from time to time for particular jobs. On the whole, though, the fact that it is a completely manual engraving process means that it isn’t particularly time efficient for anything other than fairly small engraving jobs. It’s also a bit limited for the choice of font faces available.