Tag Archives: engraving

Engraved guitar pickup cover

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on January 5, 2009 3 comments

When the word goes around, all kinds of strange things are wanted to be engraved. Knives, spoons, Zippos are now quite regular. And them comes someone who asks whether I could engrave something I’ve never heard about before.

This time it was electric guitar pickup cover. OK, I knew what electric guitar was, begin Queen fan myself, but I had really no idea what that cover was and what it’s used for. A change to learn and widen horizons. Now I know where it goes and additionally also how electric guitars actually work.

Anyway, here’s the engraving I came up with.

Engraved pickup cover

Close-up of the engraving.

Pickup cover engraving close-up

This engraving posed quite a challenge. As the detail was nickel plated, it meant “no mistakes allowed”, because when I’d slip during engraving, there’s no way to fix the mirror finish. With non-plated metal, there’s always a chance to sand or burnish down the mistake, but that’s not possible on plated detail.

I think it came out OK.

Engraved memory sticks

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on December 30, 2008 2 comments

Here are two quick engravings on memory sticks. The engraving style is called ‘piddling’, or if I want to sound expensive, then ‘double bevel’ engraving.

As these memory sticks are made from extremely soft metal, this is the only style that can be done decently on them. Can’t do any fine lines/detail on them. I drew the design on as I started to engrave, so not much preparing was needed.

Engraved memory stick

Engraved memory stick

2 quick engraving jobs

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on December 12, 2008 2 comments

Here are two quick engravings I had to do. These little projects are really good for both design and technique practice. Relatively small and fast projects.

Engraved spoon

Hand engraved spoon

Hand engraved USB memory stick

Learning English scroll

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on November 28, 2008 No comments


There’s a scroll style called English scroll. Probably the earliest type of scrolls of them all. I wanted to learn it the other day, but it’s a real trial and error when you don’t know how to make the cuts or what are the principal rules of it.

But here are my tries.The first one has some kind of similarity to English scroll, but not really.

Engraved English scroll

The second one is already more like it, but still not quite there yet.

English scroll practice

Second one with ruler – in real life it’s actually quite small.

Hand engraved English scroll

Memory stick winner

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on November 21, 2008 No comments

The memory stick winner is known now. I used rand function from ruby shell to determine the winner and my darling wife was looking over me so I couldn’t cheat:

[21:54:47] comp:~ irb
>> rand(24) + 1
=> 8

The winner is commenter number 8, who is Uthay. I will contact you and send out the memory stick as soon as I get your address.

Thank you all for participating! Watch this space to see the next competition (might be a good idea to subscribe to feed or email updates).

Next time I’m back with more delicious prize.

Memory stick giveaway

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on November 13, 2008 26 comments

UPDATE: giveaway is now over. Thanks for participating.

Did that get your attention? Good, because now is the chance to get free hand engraved 2GB USB memory stick. To participate simply leave a comment to this post stating “Me wants it” or anything with your email so I can contact the winner.

On 21st of Nov 2008 I will pick a random commenter and send the memory stick to him/her. Commenting once is enough, thank you.

This is what you are getting (measures 2.6×1.5cm).

Engraved memory stick

Engraved memory stick

If you made this far into the post I must say that this stick was a testpiece to see how good it is to engrave one. Conclusion – not that good. The metal is extremely soft and it’s very hard to do fine engraving. Also, I use acetone for design transfer and this melts the plastic. You can see from photos the problematic places.

But hey, it’s free and loaded with few of my knifemaking and engraving videos.

Next victim is either iPod Shuffle or spoon… Hmm.

Preparing to give away stuff

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on October 26, 2008 2 comments

I’ve bought a few things to see whether they are engrave-able or not. If they work out well, then, note this, I’m going to give them away to my readers. For free. Yes. Really.

If I screw them up, then I’ll have a few more shooting targets, or maybe someone would still want them.

The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to give them away. The simplest would be to pick random commenter from people who’ve commented on the ‘Give Away’ post, but maybe someone has a better idea? 

OK, here they are. ‘Top’ things are 1GB iPod Shuffle and pqi 2GB memory stick.

Actually I bought Shuffle just to test whether this aluminium is engrave-able and how the effect looks like. If it is good enough I’ll probably buy iPod Nano for one of the next give aways. I have a few spoons too, but not sure which of them are made of metal that can be engraved.

Engraving Zippo video

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on October 22, 2008 2 comments

I was in a finishing phase of Zippo engraving when I had an idea to try out time-lapse function on my camera. So I still had a chance to film shading, sharpening and stippling phases of engraving.

Enjoy!
Vimeo better quality version: Engraving Zippo.


Engraved spoon

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on October 9, 2008 2 comments

Back on the road again. I’ve been really busy last month or so with other things, so there wasn’t much going on in knife making and engraving.

So to get myself going again I grabbed a spoon from kitchen and did a quick engraving on in.

A little step-by-step.

Design done, transferred and ready to engrave:

Engraving and shading completed:

Background relieving – used rotary tool for that:

Background stippled:

Here’s full view:

All in all it took me about 3 hours to finish, including design.

I need ideas for an ad campaign

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on August 22, 2008 5 comments

Here’s your chance to help me.

This autumn I want to do a small advertising campaign to promote my hand engraving and custom knife business. Currently I have 3 things in the list I want to make for this campaign:

  • iPod nano with engraved back (maybe even a pair – black & pink, for him and for her)
  • Silver Zippo with full hand engraving
  • Engraved custom knife

Campaign purpose is to promote hand engraving and custom knives, at the same time drive traffic to my blog and website, generate links and get up in Google ranks. I want to make it a campaign in disguise – there will be a competition and winners will get these prizes.

Now here’s what I need. Ideas for which competition(s) to make. That competition should also be something that’s useful. Be it something to do with marketing (best ideas what and where to market), products (what cool things to engrave, like iPods) or whatever.

How to make this campaign more… um, viral? I want it to spread. I will probably do a photo session (hire a model and the whole shebang) and a short video for it. More ideas are very welcome, also about photo and video!

People who will comment this post and have good ideas will get a small something from me. Can’t say right now what it is, as it’s creation is in very early phases. But it’s coming. Two sides with about 15mm diameter.

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Website: Custom knives and hand engraving