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.

The nice thing about a manual engraver is that you do have control over the engrave process, each and every letter, and you can easily apply added pressure if needed or reduce it if not needed.  This can offer more control than some computerised engravers.  The trade-off for this is that you are relatively restricted in terms of font faces and the additional flourishes (such as logos or clip-art graphics).

In the short time  I’ve been involved in the trophy and engraving industry I’ve learned that this engrave has heaps of potential capabilities that I just haven’t explored.  For me, this is because the computerised engravers usually fill my needs for more complex engraving.

I have found that the biggest limitation on a manual engraver is the inability to automate and scale.  Each engrave is a manual process where you need to be actively using the engraver.  Changing an engraving plate is a process that requires some thought and attention to ensure that the next engrave will be in the right position.  Changing the test you’re engraving means changing the layout of your letters – something that can be a lengthy process for a larger engraving job.

Ultimately, it was these sorts of factors that encouraged us to very quickly enter the world of computerised engraving.  In the next article in this series I’ll look at computerised rotary engravers.

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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.

Coming from a long computer background i was used to dealing with fonts on a daily basis.  I thought I understood how they worked and how to put them to best use depending on my requirements.  On moving to a computer engraver (at least, a rotary version, I’m fairly sure a laser engraver would function more like I’m used to in terms of font handling) I had to un-learn a range of things.

For starters, a rotary engraver works on lines.  If you want an area, you have to fill it with lines.  One line at a time.  Almost every computer font is actually an area rather than a line.  That means that engraving a standard computer font can leave you with an outline of your chosen font or, if you’ve told the engraver software to fill, a series of nested lines.  In some circumstances this produces a very effective engrave.  The rest of the time, it makes for a very slow engraving job (i.e. it takes a long time to finish on the engraver) and the result is not all that pleasing.

A good engrave really relies on dedicated engraving fonts.  My Roland engravers came with a couple of these engraving fonts only.  That left me only little better off than my old manual engraver in some cases.  I raised it with the company that sold the engraver and they helped me find a few more.  This really helped.  I also learned that some computer (TTF) fonts actually engrave quite well – albeit taking much longer.

Looking around Google it seems that finding actual line fonts for use with Dr Engrave (Roland’s engraver software) aren’t readily available.  That’s a shame as the few I have are far more effective, particularly on large jobs where you’re engraving 30 or 40 trophy plates in one go.

Standard computer fonts that I’ve found seem to work fairly well include Edwardian Script, a nice script font that engraves well as a line font (don’t use a fill) as long as you’re using mixed case (all capitals becomes unreadable); Monotype Corsiva, a less agressive script font that can be used without a fill at smaller font sizes (really needs fill at larger sizes); and, Playbill, useful on engraves where you need a font that is tall for it’s width, I always use it filled.

This only really touches the surface on fonts but it’s a start…

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