Lindsay Point

Thank you all for your answers to my question.

I use the Powerhone with the dual angle, and it is a great tool to sharpen the engravers, whatever angle I want. I'm buzzy on another shading exercise that I hope to finish soon. All done with a 115° symmetric heel. As I don't have any practice plates yet, I use a lot of Titanium, as I think I will make some engraved items with this material.

I want to make some engraved buckles in Titanium, some engraved spoons for baby's and a lot of engraved jewellery. I have read that for some of you Titanium is not easy to engrave, I know that is not true. Titanium is perfect for engraving.

arnaud

Arnaud: CP (commercially pure) titanium is ok for engraving. 6A4LV titanium (industrial grade) can be extremely difficult. Personally, I will only engrave CP.

Sam that is correct, here we call the different Titanium alloys, grade1, grade2 etc till grade7.
Grade 1 is the purest and the softest and it is the one I work with. I can weld it, make wire of it, and so on. You have to do some thing a little different then whit silver or gold, but I have made very unusual jewellery in Titanium. And for a big part that is why I want to learn engraving, to cut in the Titanium to make flowers butterfly's and so on.

But I like the workmanship of engraving that mush, that I also want to become a all round engraver, as there are only a few engravers left to do it by hand.
Younger people don't even know about hand engraving, and that is a pitty.

I'm sure that working together to educate our public can make a difference.

arnaud

In the parallel universe of jewelry engraving we use it all. For sharpening square gravers we use the device made by Paul Hamler of Georgia USA and sold on Steve Lindsay's site for a very short period of time. It works very well, but the best feature was that he was able to supply us with template discs for square tools from 60-90 degrees, which is what we use. (The 110 - 120 points are too wide for us to use.) Its faster and slightly more accurate to use than the dual angle sharpener. And the inaccuracy of the dual angle is in the one using it, not in the fixture itself.

We'll probably add the Lindsay system to the mix when he comes out with a 90 degree template.

The dual angle fixture does gets quite a workout sharpening everything else, from liners of any width, flat tools, shad bellies, whatever. Its incredibly useful for turning the GRS QC flat tools into round tools.

And on occasion when I'm pressed for time I pull out my ancient india stone and give a quick rub followed by a jab into some wood on my bench and I'm back to work in about 30 seconds.

But the number one tool for sharpening is Sam's sharpening DVD. It great that it gives you instructions on how to sharpen just about any form graver, but its almost as useful for showing you what the sharpened tool is supposed to look like when its done. That's actually pretty useful to show apprentice engravers.

When titanium was first manufactured into jewelry it was an incredible hard nosed beast. There were websites detailing the hours jewelry would spend making simple small pieces of titanium jewelry and when it was sent to us for engraving it was torture. Constant re-sharpening and constant changing of layouts because of cuts that went wrong. It was a novelty metal for jewelers, just like aluminum was at one time. But as the demand grew and more friendly alloys were available it became just another metal to learn to engrave.

Allan, I don't see why not using a 120° engraver for jewellery, I only use these.

some examples of Titanium, some with engraving using the 120°

deleted photos

arnaud

sam said:

Very cool, Steve. Where do you engrave with your portable setup?

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To me the coolest thing about the Lindsay system is it's portability so I just had to do it.

I can engrave with it anywhere I can find a place to sit. This past Summer I spent some lunch hours sitting on a wide bench outside. I set the micro-ball vise on top of the closed box (if you pull out one of the accessory boxes it makes a perfect spot). I tried working standing up by a convenient ledge but I have no touch at all standing. Wouldn't be a problem if I could afford a PalmControl but for now I'll sit.

I also take it along on trips so I don't get bored in the hotel room. Grab a spare pool towel to lay down to catch the chips (I take it outside to shake it out later) and you're all set. Current plans for this year have the ever-indulgent wife and I going to Pheonix for the NRA show and just me going to BLADE & the Engrave-In. The Box O' Happiness will be along on both trips.

If and when I get good enough and do shows I'll bring the Box along to them, of course.

I also use it right at my bench with my much beloved microscope. I added a 'monster cupholder' to the leg of my bench. It's a pair of PVC plumbing parts, a 4" end cap with a 3" -> 4" adapter press fit into it to make it taller. Had to trim down a seam inside the adapter to let the 20oz tank fit. Put two screws through the side of the 4" cap to hold it to the leg of the bench with it positioned so the regulator is right at the height I want. If I wanted to get really wound up I could have my GRS GraverMach SC fired up at the same time and switch between three different gravers by just turning a knob and / or moving between the two foot pedals. Not that I have (yet), but the point is I could.

Arnaud, it depends what your going to use the tools for. We cut only precious metals and the occasional titanium, pewter or stainless steel and ninety percent of the time its lettering; mostly monograms and inscriptions. I may be wrong but I think the development of the tools wider than the ninety was originally tied to their ability to reduce points breaking as quickly as they do with ninety degree tools. With the metals we cut, that's much less of a problem.

We first heard about about the wide tools in my shop in Philadelphia from a jewelry engraver who belonged to FEGA and read about it there but never tried to make one. It didn't make sense to any of us because what we had always worked well so why bother to find something new. Many years later I first tried one of the wide tools when I took one of the GRS classes with Sam Alfano, maybe about 8 years ago. I didn't like it. I also got one of the sharpened ones that Steve Lindsay sent with the purchase of an air graver. I didn't like that one either. (And the ninety works even better with the air powered tools once Sam showed me how small the heels on his tools were - it was only a fifth of the length we were using.)

There were a couple of inconsequential problems but the main problem was that for me it cut too shallow for the width. With a ninety degree tool I can start out at a deeper depth with a very fine cut that finishes into a very wide and deeper bright cut. If you start out at the same depth with a wide tool, its already a too little wide.


Happy New Year

Allan

Arnaud, I used to hand push for twenty years in the jewelry field. All my gravers were hand sharpened using intuition and feel. I remember some days spending an awful lot of time sharpening over and over again. For script letters especially I found the hand sharpened gravers with the rounded heals to be wonderful. After I got a power pneumatic engraver I also ended up buying a power hone. I found that with the power hone using the Lindsay geometry (which I find to generally be the most logical, providing the cleanest lines on turns) that I could work for days sometimes without breaking a point.
Sometimes now though when I'm doing script lettering I find myself remembering the good old days of when all my gravers were hand sharpened. At times I still find that hand pushing with hand sharpened gravers gives me the brightest bright cuts. Theres something about the slight burnish effect that happens with a hand pushed graver that's been hand polished on 4/0 paper. It's not the sharpest graver in the world but it does leave a great bright cut, especially with script letters. Only problem though is that most of my old gravers have all been resharpened to high tech angles on a power hone.
My word of advice to anyone going power hone is don't mess with your old hand sharpened gravers. Save them them just as they are and buy new gravers to machine sharpen. I tore apart all my old fitted wood handles and graver shanks to chuck up in machines to my loss. Now I need to do some restoration work on my hand sharpened graver set up.

Lindsay Templets and DA sharpener??

Hi,

Both systems have there place in sharpening gravers as does hand sharpening.

I think all must be used at some point.

I personally use a Faceting machine with a custom chuck for grinding any angle with any heel or any relief grind.

I also grind round carbide gravers with it and you must have a relief grind on these they must also be keyed for repeatability.

the faceting machine is acurate to 1/10 of a degree. Once you have your flash cards for the grinds you want it is very easy to use and in my opinion cannot be beat for flexability and safety. ( It has a drip system so you don't breath the ground steel).

AirAmp