Question for Browning engravers?

[ED DELORGE]

I have been rebluing and re-engraving the engraving on auto-5 Brownings for about 25 years and I am doing one at the present. The leaves in the stim pattern always have little nicks on the edge of the engraved lines. It looks very nice and gives character and life to what would be just a smimple engraving pattern.
My question is how did they do that? Of course you only see that on the Belguim guns not on the Japaneese guns.

Ed DeLorge

 

[fegarex]

Ed,
I assume you are just seeing the actual cuts. From what I have seen on A-5s is the lines were cut FAST. The actual cuts were nearly a 1/16 inch in length. They would hit the heck out of the hammer! You're just seeing choppy cuts. You'll also notice that the layout of those is made so there is very few actual curves. There are long flowing lines and mostly "elipses" instead of scrolls. This design was made to cut fast and easy.

 

[John B.]

Ed,
From what some of the old FN/Browning have told me they were expected to engrave 8 (eight) Superposed Grade 1 shotguns in a days work.
These have more engraving on them than an A-5 so only the Lord knows how many A-5's they had to cut in a day.
As Rex said, they didn't hesitate to keep that graver moving along, took some pretty good whacks and left some large progression marks in the channel.
It's suprising how good they look to the naked eye for the speed they had to go on these lower grades.
Much like some of the old muzzle loaders, not perfect by todays standards but still great honest work.
Things were a lot different on the higher grades, as you know.
Some beautiful work was done on these even though speed was still required.
And 95% of it was H&C with the addition of a little push engraving.
John B.

 

[ED DELORGE]

Hello Rex and John, thanks for the input.

Ed DeLorge