13Nov/08

Memory stick giveaway

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.

26Oct/08

Preparing to give away stuff

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.

19Oct/08

Silver inlay

As there is so much to learn in engraving world, I have to tackle those things one by one. This time I tried a process called wire inlay. Usually gold is inlaid into steel, but as I had neither at hand I inlaid silver wire into copper.

It is good idea to inlay softer metal into harder one, but having limited resources I had to do vice versa. That wasn’t so bright idea from my side, but fortunately everything sort of worked out.

Here’s a little step-by-step progress.

Channels for wire inlay are cut and extended/undercut to receive wire.

That is the view I see from microscope. Here’s prepared channel and some inlaid wire. When wire is inserted into channel it is beaten flush to copper with brass punch. During that process wire will extend into undercut channels and doesn’t come out later.

After wire is inlaid, the surface is sanded smooth. I use 600-grit stone for that.

Same thing from microscope.

Inlay is completed and sanded. Now it is still needed to trace the outline of inlaid wire to make it pop, leaves need shading too.

Finito.

All in all it took me about 13 hours to complete. I learned a lot from this practice, but as you can probably see there are still many mistakes. So more practice is on the way. Hopefully next time I can already inlay softer metal into harder one. That makes the process much easier.

Now if anyone could send me $1000 USD so I could buy 24K gold wire. It’s for practice, honestly.

09Oct/08

Engraved spoon

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.

22Aug/08

I need ideas for an ad campaign

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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Follow me @ Twitter: vilts
Website: Custom knives and hand engraving

04Aug/08

Engraved silver slimline Zippo

Here’s an engraved silver Zippo I did for a customer. As this was my first project where I had to engrave on sterling silver I had some doubts about it, but it turned out just great. Sterling was very well engrave-able and result looks really good. Design was submitted by customer, all I had to do was to engrave it.

Hand engraved silver Zippo

Hand engraved silver Zippo

Hand engraved Zippo

Hand engraved Zippo in a box

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Now you can follow me at Twitter, my name there is vilts. Usually I update it once or twice a day, you’re welcome to follow me there.

16Jul/08

Domain name change

Small update in blog. From now on this blog can be also accessed from url http://blog.knivesandengraving.com/.

I changed the address under knivesandengraving.com, because this site is where our ‘business face’ is. So SEO wise it would be a good idea if blog is under the same name.

Please update your links and feeds.