Some recent jobs

[Kev Williams]

From the "actual engraving" files ;) ...

Been doing a lot of guns lately, this is my favorite (mostly because I don't usually get to see the finished product!)

A guy dropped off a slide and a piece of paper, "I need these put on each side of the slide, I'm building this for one of the first responders, a fireman..."
Cool! The paper appears to be a copied photo of a hand drawing.

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I pretty much had to hand-digitize the drawing, but not much to it. I found a little different 'Liberty online to work with.
After the digitizing comes the white-knuckle part...

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Pics my customer sent me of the finished firearm--

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Here's a job that's not for everyone-- engraving 4" tall letters into 304 stainless, .012" deep, .180" wide cutter and no depth gauge. Each letter takes 10-15 minutes and pretty much totals the tool's cutting edge. Slow, noisy and messy. But that's one of the benefits of putting the IS7000 out in the garage, I can start the machine, shut the door and go work on something else and not have to hear it! :)
These are 18" x 30" door kicks, for a sheet metal shop. Their customer (I won't name names ;) ) didn't want painted letters, only engraved. I was a bit worried since some folks are put off by the tooling marks, but I was told they just loved 'em! -which is good, because they're not going to be cheap! (but somehow, I think they can afford it...)

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And finally, after owning my Triumph for 8 months, I finally decided to see if I could tone it down enough to engrave laminate. Full speed and 12 power did the trick, the results are much better than I expected! It's now busy etching a bunch of small tags in 1/8" Rowmark. I'd put a pic up, but the board just told me my limit is 8! Oh well...

[Mike Null]

Kev

Great work. I have some jobs to run on mine NH next week but they're in brass. What cutter did you use on the guns?

[Jackson Phillips]

My age is starting to show. The kick plate customer's logo used to look like this...
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It looks fantastic though. I agree with them - the vertical tool marks make it really stand out.

[Kev Williams]

Mike, I've always sharpened my own tools. I like buying solid carbide tools, because I can grind new flats, usually at least twice, so I get 3x the life.

Here's what I use to engrave the slides (and most guns), it's an 11/64" solid carbide, I cut the flat on this one (the dark spot toward the top is the bottom of the original flat), I cut the sides at 26° with a 35° draft angle. I just tip them by hand (with the help of a 15x loupe), tip width on this started at around .007". This tool just finished doing a logo on a Glock slide, it's pretty dull. Hardened slides wear them out quick...

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On the opposite end of the scale is the tool I cut the SS kicks with, it's a 1/4" diameter carbide tipped cutter, same grind angles (I rarely change them), and the tip is closer to .140" than the .180" I guessed at above ;)
I cut my tip angles pretty steep, no particular reason why. You can see the cutting edge is severely worn down, that's the result after cutting the "ER" on the plate in the pics. Customers sometimes ask why engraving SS is so expensive, it's because half my time on the job is spent on the tool grinder!

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[Mike Null]

Kev

Thank you for the info. I have resisted doing ss and in fact most metals. I have relied on the diamond to do most of what I do in silver, pewter and brass but I'm now going to begin with more routing as the diamond just doesn't get deep enough on the brass.