Serbian Pendant

[davidshe]

Here are a few notes on a project I just finished to hopefully give back a little after learning so much on this forum.

-The customer wanted the Serbian Coat of Arms engraved onto a 1" wide Sterling Silver pendant. After a few design attempts I realized a round pendant would not work and I changed it to an oval. duhhhhh I used auto-trace in Adobe Illustrator to create the initial vector drawing then manually touched it up.

- I had trouble with a clean transfer with my inkjet until I realized I needed to save the drawing in illustrator with outline mode only (or 0.25 stroke width) and then print it.

- had a large drawing next to me as I was engraving and often used a scribe to draw in the small detail as I was cutting.

- used my NSK rotary tool with a 1/8 round dental burr to remove background. Don't think I could have done this with the 1/4 round. Also used my benchtop milling machine to cut the pendant outline and drill the hole.

- stippling was done with a 3/32 beading tool sharpened to a long skinny point with 4 facets. This was the most consistent point of several I tried.

- cleaned up edges with 105 graver but most all other engraving was done with a 120.

- client did not want blackened background so I decided to electro plate it with 24K gold and then carefully sanded the gold off the top with wet 2000 grit 3M paper.

- the backside has the meaning of the four C's (C's are S's in Serbian)

- took me about twice as long as I figured but client is extremely happy and so am I! Will likely lead to more work!

Thanks for looking.

 

[monk]

beautiful. very nice contrast and depth. i agree-- the oval format way better than circular.

 

[dlilazteca]

Thanks for sharing
What is the background and letters finished with?

Carlos De La O III

 

[thughes]

David, very cool.

 

[RDP]

Nice work David, thanks for sharing,

Richard.

 

[davidshe]

Monk, Todd and Richard, thank you for your compliments. Carlos, the background and letters are gold plated.

 

[monk]

interesting, to say the least. how did you do the plating ?

 

[davidshe]

Monk - I use a gold plating kit that I purchased awhile back from a company called Gold Plating Services. About $500 by the time you get the things you really need. Seems to work pretty well as long as the surface is perfectly cleaned. Some things need to be nickel plated first as an undercoat to hold up well. I actually got the idea from someone else on the forum and I first tried it on a couple of flare cut silver bracelets. The plating is pretty good on certain things but I do plan to begin doing some gold inlay soon and I know that will be my next big challenge!