Help, please: Beginner wanting to learn lettering.

[Oneduck]

Hello, I’m working as a silver/goldsmith and want to add lettering via hand push engraving to my skill set. I know it may take years.

I’m curious if anyone with the time and patience to respond could give me some things to practice they would both develop the base of my skill capacity in general as well as move me forward in my lettering goal.

I have an engraving ball, sharpening stone and a microscope. If you have any practice plate suggestions I would be so grateful.

Best and warmest!

 

[monk]

our benevolent landlord, sam alfano, has a very nice dvd on that very subject.
check it out

 

[DaveAtWeirs]

Hand push is so old that there's a bunch of books that have gone out of copywrite so you can get them for free online. The Jewelry Engravers Manual is a great one and you can either get it as a free pdf or buy a hard copy for a few quid on amazon. It covers all the basics but just be aware it's an old style book so it can be hard to get through sometimes when they're referencing plate 45 in the text and that plate was two pages earlier or three pages ahead. It's got some invaluable plates on how to go about cutting letters, going so far as to number the cuts in order and show the direction they should be done. Quite a lot of it doesn't apply to air assisted engraving but if you're sticking with hand push it'll be invaluable.

Having said that, with the hand push work I've seen, the ways each engraver goes about lettering is as unique as hand writing. I've worked on some very old trophies and seeing all the different styles and methods from over 200 years all collected together is fascinating.

 

[allan621]

I'd like to offer a different opinion. If you're doing this as a hobby then none of the following applies. But since you are a professional you should take a more professional attitude. I would recommend one of the air powered tools. I use a lindsay airgraver, but the GRS tools and pulse graver are of equal value. The use of these tools will cut off years of practice learning to control the hand powered tool. The way I look at it is that the development of these tools, along with improved sharpening devices has created a leap forward in the ability of hand engravers to achieve a higher level of craft.

Firearm and knife scroll engraving is in a golden age. If you can go back to find engravings from the 60's and 70's and see the absolute jump in the quality of finished work as the years progressed with the introduction of this new generation of tools.

And yes it cost a lot of money to get started but how much would it cost to spend a couple of years learning to use the hand tool. I have a student and it took him just one month to start cutting smoothly and accurately using his Lindsay airgraver.

There is an engraver on instagram that waxes poetic about using a hand tool and hand sharpening; building a sort of mystique on this kind of "pure" engraving. Some things are done well but not everything. And if I had to go back to using a hand powered tool I had better be waking up in the morning and dressing in a colonial costume before going out to ye hand engraving studio at some historic place.

I have been doing lettering for 45 years on jewelry and have seen the evolution of the craft with the introduction of the air powered tools . If you are interested send my a private message.

Allan