The following quote impeded my progress for years. I was foolish to heed it. "Any aspiring engraver must fight the urge to start cutting before the drawing and design phase is perfected." George Sherwood
To find, " ... practical excercises to acquire certains well-defined skills ... " read...
I'm planning to inlay some silver lines into a brass cylinder. I am an intermediate engraver when do my best work. I plan to cut the channel sides on my lathe then work the bottom and corners with gravers. What hardness of silver is best? Which channel widths are easier? What should be the...
I have spent thousands of hours (really) in a biology laboratory looking through stereomicroscopes. I say: adjust your workpiece and chair height so that your neck is comfortable and your arms are relaxed; rest your head on your pillow in bed.
If you get grass stains on your pants, water won't remove them, but alcohol will. You need to match the polarity of the stain (ink) with the polarity of the solvent. Water is most polar, acetone less, isopropyl alcohol still less. As you test various solvents, choose safe ones (!!!) with...
I have been using Adobe Photoshop for photographs for many years. It's excellent for sizing, retouching, labeling and manipulating tonal values (gamma). However it's not vector based and can not originate a scroll or smooth one. I found "Inkscape for engraving scrollwork layout" on YouTube...
The B&L stereo zooms with which I am familiar have 2 metal clips on the bottom, one on each side of the objective lens. The 0.5 lens made just for those scopes has a pair of metal rods ~1/4 inch long on either side of the lens mount. You push the lens onto the bottom of the scope (there's a...