The nastiest cludge-job that ever worked

[Stuart Petrie]

I'm not sure how many of you have used a Vision Max rotary engraver, but its a pretty finicky piece of hardware that is essentially impossible to realign an urn in once you've taken it out. I ran a job the other day and realized 1 letter into the engraving that I'd missed a letter. Quick thinking, I hammered the stop and pulled of the silliest move thats ever worked. When you type a word into the vision expert software it centers the word, so I marked a spot on my screen with a sharpie, typed the proper name in, and dragged the whole job over an inch so it was aligned with the screen mark and ran it again. Worked like a charm and I didn't have to write anything off as scrap

[Kev Williams]

Urn, as in held in a rotary?

In over 40 years in this biz, one aspect I'm highly proficient in these days is fixing screwups ...

When I have to add a missing letter (or piece of graphic) what I do find a sharp corner or point of the letter or graphic close to the missing part. On screen, I find the same spot, then just draw a small box, starting at the sharp corner I chose. Then I start the machine (tool off) and pause it before it begins to engrave it. The tool will now be located at the chosen point. Lower the tool down, and then using a magnifying loupe, carefully move the part to line up the corner of the letter you chose to match where the tool is, then clamp in place, and double check alignment after clamping. Stop/reset the machine, delete the square you drew, and now you can engrave the missing letter in the correct place.

If you don't have an ink-pen attachment, do consider getting one, they're great for 'test driving' your layout by drawing on some tape- works great for making sure you're re-engraving in the right place too!