Jeroen
Member
Last week, Chris DeCamillis presented his new pneumatic system for engraving and stone setting, the En-Set, at the Jewelry fare Baselworld 2012.
As Basel is only 600km from where we live in Belgium, and as we were very curious about the new system, we went over to Basel for two days. “We” that is my father-in-law and teacher Arnaud en myself. We slept in the camper, took the special bus from the parking to Basel Messe, everything very well arranged there.
Arnaud and I had already tried and tested Chris’ new hand piece, that he sent, but that was on a GraverSmith. We knew it works at a very low speed, but Chris had also told us that, connected to the En-Set, it works completely different. So, we were pretty curious!
To me, it was also an opportunity, as new in this branch, to see and examine a lot (and I mean “a lot”!) of gemstones, jewelry, materials … and to get an explanation by every question I had about all of it. Thanks again for that, Arnaud!
So after visiting hall 2 and hall 4, we went through the jewelry in hall 3 and then arrived at the basement where all the materials were gathered: the smell of oil showed us the way, a good smell, the smell of “the making of”, the most interesting part to me. It was there Chris found us.
After a warm welcome and meeting Tira, who was there with Chris demonstrating the En-Set, Leonardo, who was demonstrating the Artesa Engraving machine, and Jordi and family, who distributes the system, Chris invited us to try out the En-Set.
And it works quite different! Once you understand what it does, why and how, it’s easy to find the right settings for a lot of different purposes. At the En-set itself, there is only the controller of the pressure: less and more. It has foot-control and that is different: it’s electric. The more you push, the more hits you get while the power remains the same. That means you can control the hand piece very precise, with the same power, but fast an slow, more and less hits. Not that I ever used chisel and hammer to engrave (I did and do while restoring cars etc.), but to me it looks very much like that: you can hit the chisel even powerful one time, as you do it five or ten times one after another. The En-set foot control does the same: you can push it so controlled, that it hits only once. It hits powerful as fast and as slow as you wish, and still gives very same cuts that way. When we talked about the system over Skype, Chris described engraving with our GraverSmith and engraving with the En-set as running a Yamaha and a Harley, the first running at high rpm, the second al low rpm. And that is really how it cuts: “tak-tak-tak-tak” compared to “trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”.
So at the En-Set you set the pressure, with the foot-pedal you control the speed. The handpiece itself is also adaptable: you can put different hammers in it, even no hammer, you can fine-tune the distance between hammer and collet, what gives al lot of possibilities combined with different power-settings and different speeds. So you can sculpture, hit very hard, cut really deep, and with the light hammer or without hammer, really fine shading is easy to do with the same hand piece.
There is also a second version of the En-Set, with digital control, and with the possibility to change the control: instead of setting the power (psi) on the En-Set and the speed by the foot-control, you can switch to speed-control on the En-Set and power-control by the pedal. It seems confusing, but I got very fast used to the ‘different’ working.
So we both spent quite some time testing the En-Set and watching Chris and Tira demonstrating and explaining it and we enjoyed it! On top of that, Jordi invited us for dinner with the whole team and his family: a most warm evening we spent with them!
So to me: Basel was great!
For more pictures and explanation: http://www.engraversstudio.com/apps...h-with-chris-at-the-baselworld-2012?page=last
Jeroen
As Basel is only 600km from where we live in Belgium, and as we were very curious about the new system, we went over to Basel for two days. “We” that is my father-in-law and teacher Arnaud en myself. We slept in the camper, took the special bus from the parking to Basel Messe, everything very well arranged there.
Arnaud and I had already tried and tested Chris’ new hand piece, that he sent, but that was on a GraverSmith. We knew it works at a very low speed, but Chris had also told us that, connected to the En-Set, it works completely different. So, we were pretty curious!
To me, it was also an opportunity, as new in this branch, to see and examine a lot (and I mean “a lot”!) of gemstones, jewelry, materials … and to get an explanation by every question I had about all of it. Thanks again for that, Arnaud!
So after visiting hall 2 and hall 4, we went through the jewelry in hall 3 and then arrived at the basement where all the materials were gathered: the smell of oil showed us the way, a good smell, the smell of “the making of”, the most interesting part to me. It was there Chris found us.
After a warm welcome and meeting Tira, who was there with Chris demonstrating the En-Set, Leonardo, who was demonstrating the Artesa Engraving machine, and Jordi and family, who distributes the system, Chris invited us to try out the En-Set.
And it works quite different! Once you understand what it does, why and how, it’s easy to find the right settings for a lot of different purposes. At the En-set itself, there is only the controller of the pressure: less and more. It has foot-control and that is different: it’s electric. The more you push, the more hits you get while the power remains the same. That means you can control the hand piece very precise, with the same power, but fast an slow, more and less hits. Not that I ever used chisel and hammer to engrave (I did and do while restoring cars etc.), but to me it looks very much like that: you can hit the chisel even powerful one time, as you do it five or ten times one after another. The En-set foot control does the same: you can push it so controlled, that it hits only once. It hits powerful as fast and as slow as you wish, and still gives very same cuts that way. When we talked about the system over Skype, Chris described engraving with our GraverSmith and engraving with the En-set as running a Yamaha and a Harley, the first running at high rpm, the second al low rpm. And that is really how it cuts: “tak-tak-tak-tak” compared to “trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”.
So at the En-Set you set the pressure, with the foot-pedal you control the speed. The handpiece itself is also adaptable: you can put different hammers in it, even no hammer, you can fine-tune the distance between hammer and collet, what gives al lot of possibilities combined with different power-settings and different speeds. So you can sculpture, hit very hard, cut really deep, and with the light hammer or without hammer, really fine shading is easy to do with the same hand piece.
There is also a second version of the En-Set, with digital control, and with the possibility to change the control: instead of setting the power (psi) on the En-Set and the speed by the foot-control, you can switch to speed-control on the En-Set and power-control by the pedal. It seems confusing, but I got very fast used to the ‘different’ working.
So we both spent quite some time testing the En-Set and watching Chris and Tira demonstrating and explaining it and we enjoyed it! On top of that, Jordi invited us for dinner with the whole team and his family: a most warm evening we spent with them!
So to me: Basel was great!
For more pictures and explanation: http://www.engraversstudio.com/apps...h-with-chris-at-the-baselworld-2012?page=last
Jeroen
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