Beginning Engraving

Some time back I wrote apiece on engraving for this journal. It’s been long enough that I’ll briefly cover a few of the basics again, such as where to get help, how to make a graver, and how to get started. Then I’ll show you the steps I take to carve into a real project so you can see from start to finish at least one section of the project. Before we begin, I believe that to be a successful engraver you must have at least some small sense of artistic feeling.

You don’t have to be Van Gogh or Vermeer, or (God forbid) Picasso, but I believe you have to be able to tell when something is balanced. While it’s well and good to say that your engraving is how The tools shown are all you need to get started.

There’s info on lettering and on every tool you might need, how to get certain effects, many hundreds of drawings and illustrations, and many examples of some of the finest engraving by top masters. you want it to look, even though it might be regarded by critics as being not that good, remember it’ll survive long after you’re gone. Try to make your engraving look like what you want future generations to think of you. If in fact you want a Picasso-like figure with one ear and two noses, that’s ultimately up to you.

And it might even be well received. Your author, however, is mighty conservative. What you’re going to do as a firearm engraver is cover various areas of the gun with patterns cut into the metal that look right and fit in, and either disguise or augment the lines and sections of the gun. The work has to be uniform all over the various parts of the gun. It would not do to have full coverage of, say, a 1911’s slide and only patches of engraving on the frame.

Nor would it be appropriate to have large scrolls on one side and tiny scrolls on the other, or scrolls on the frame and oak leaves on the slide. However, bear in mind appropriately mixing different engraving styles can produce a wonderful effect. Check out Purdey’s rose-and-scroll patterns, or Rigby’s leaves and scrollwork on his double rifles. There are ways to "cheat" without it’s being noticeable.

My relatively famous .458, featured in my article in Cartridges of the World, 14th Edition and in my book The Alaskan Retreater’s Notebook (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.), has patches of engraving here and there. The barrel has images on the front sight and on the sling ring wrapped around the barrel, plus an image of a Cape buffalo on top of the barrel where it joins the action. There’s scrollwork there too, and a banner for my monogram.

The trigger guard has images of my cat and a bird in my hand surrounded by scrolls. The floorplate has my beloved fox friend, a mouse, and a bird. The bolt handle has some engraving, too. Yet there are exactly no cuts on the action itself. Why is that? The action is an early Springfield, case hardened to the point where all I could do was ruin my gravers when I tried to put

This is a copy of the work of L. D. Nimschke. What if that’s the best you can do on apiece of steel? Don’t give up! even the slightest scratch on it. Yet no one notices the absence of engraving on the action proper. By the way, my Alaskan Retreater’s Notebook tells how I became an engraver and what was involved in that effort. A key factor was my burning desire to achieve that goal. All rifle actions are not impossible to cut. I built my a Browning action and I was able to cut its action relatively easily.

I put an open design of rose and scroll on it, which leaves lots of the metal uncut. Besides being less work, this type of engraving is to my eye more pleasant than full coverage, especially the deeply contoured sculpting as seen on some German custom rifles of long ago. Without getting too much into matters of taste, some fancy guns I’ve seen in catalogs from major auction houses like Julia have scrolls deeply cut and inlaid with gold, and similar work covering the entire gun.

While such work is amazing and exceptionally difficult, I don’t like it. I prefer understatement. Here’s a recap of where to look for help. First, go to as many art museums as you can and look at all the great old paintings. This will help give you a taste for what’s artistic and what’s not. Look at the old masters, not modern art. Leave the modern stuff to Steve Martin, who has a sharp eye for it. If you have time and enough interest, a course in art appreciation might be valuable.

Most important, by any and all means look at as many engraved guns as you can. Gather images. With the Internet, that’s easy. Gather a collection of images of engraved guns, blow ‘em up, and look at how they’re done in detail. Some of them look pretty crude up close, and some, like the work of the late Lynton Mc Kenzie for example, look stunning at high Mc Kenzie often engraved under a microscope.

His English-style scrollwork was perhaps the best in the world, so don’t be discouraged by a close examination of his work. No one else but maybe one or two top engravers could do as well. You’ll need a good book, and Meek’s The Art of Engraving is still one of the best for beginning engravers. Brownells still offers Lynton Mc Kenzie’s DVDs last time I looked, but I’d start with Meek’s book, also available from Brownells. I suggest, as does Meek, that you do a bunch of work with pencil and paper.

There’s no better way to train yourself than this and you’ll quickly learn if you have a knack for it. Put away your i Phone, let your Twitter and Facebook accounts fend for themselves awhile, pick up a pencil and start drawing scrolls. Draw an image of the gun you want to engrave, or a portion of it, and experiment with pencil to find out where the scrolls should go and how they should flow together.

Fill ‘em in properly, maybe draw some overlapping scrolls, and when you think you’re ready, get started with the real thing. Get a graver, learn how to sharpen it, mount it in a suitable wood handle, get yourself a light hammer and start cutting steel. Get some practice plates and draw on them with pencil or very pointed Sharpie to give a thin line. Mount the plate in a vise of any sort on as sturdy a bench as you can get and start cutting what you’ve drawn. I suggest starting by drawing some straight lines, maybe

There’s just one to go. an inch long, and cut them. Making a straight cut is much harder than cutting curves, so it’s great practice. Draw some scrolls and cut them. Don’t cut too deeply. The little undercut on the properly sharpened chisel will keep the graver from cutting too deeply into the steel, but you still have to learn how to control the graver to cut a line that’s of even depth, which also means uniform width, and learn how to follow the lines you’ve drawn.

Brownells sells five practice plates for $12.77 as this is written. They also have some gravers, but today I’d go to Glen Steel Gravers (grstools.com, for my graver needs. They have ‘em all, including some "beading" tools, which can be tricky to make. I’ve made my own, but with their selection in graduated sizes it doesn’t pay to try to make them. These bead-makers have a hollow tip that makes a dot or bead in the steel when struck with a hammer.

They are used to fill out the background between scrolls, giving a sense of depth to the work. Nimschke, my favorite of the old masters, used them frequently. If you want only one graver to begin with I suggest a square one, about 1/8" to 3/32" square, length about two to three inches. This is mounted into a simple handle like a wood dowel, and be sure to put a ferrule made from copper pipe onto the dowel to keep it from splitting. The dowel should be about 5/8 to 3/4 inch in diameter, whatever’s comfortable.

Another type of handle for gravers has a tulip or mushroom shape. These are intended for driving the graver with your hand, not the hammer. A relatively small or fine graver set into one of the tulipor mushroomshaped handles is great for making shading cuts, and probably ought to be the second graver you obtain. To sharpen a square graver, grind the tip at about a 45-degree angle to give an elongated-diamond shape, one of the corners making a point.

Then knock back the metal under the tip on both sides for a short length, maybe an eighth to three-sixteenths. If it’s too long it’s hard to cut curves. Make sure the undercut comes to a short, straight line underneath and ends in a sharp point. The undercut prevents the graver from just digging into the work, and instead it’ll slide along the groove you make. Keep the point sharp with a fine stone as you go along. Meek gives a great description of how to do this.

About the chasing hammer, if you have a lathe I suggest you make your own, as I did. It’s easy. Keep it small, and make the handle slim so it has some give. Some of the graver hammers sold are more like sledge hammers, not conducive to careful or delicate work, and their cost is quite high. Engraving is basically cutting a vee-shaped groove into the steel along the lines you have drawn on the steel. Controlling the depth and therefore the width of the line is what you have to learn.

The apparent width of the line can be altered by rotating the tool axially toward one side. Turning corners is done by rotating the tool away from the direction you want to turn. As noted before, because cutting straight lines of uniform width is one of the harder things to learn, I suggest you begin there. Here are two more points to keep in mind about engrav- Far 45 auto. Surely you can do better than this! The scrolls don’t need to be huge nor perfect to give a pleasant effect.

44 Magnum, the first step is to take out the cylinder. ing. First, if you engrave a blued gun you’ll have to refinish it. If you need to reblue a gun the best way to bring out its finest—and once you know what you’re doing you would not bother engraving a gun that did not have a heart of gold in the first place—is to rust blue it. This is not particularly difficult, but quite time consuming. Be aware of that.

The author came up with a simple design that leaves lots of the gun without engraving, but will make it stand out as being something different. The pencil gave the engraver the approximate size and location for the engraving work. The next step, not shown, is to fill in the curves with smaller curves, blending lines or shading, and do it to all five of the areas on the cylinder. The second point is that if you engrave a stainless-steel gun you won’t be burdened with rebluing.

However, you won’t have the option of erasing or obscuring any slip-ups on the stainless surface, which you can do to some extent on a blued gun. Once you get past the concept of practice guns and start working on better subjects you might find many The spindle thread is left-hand, and don’t lose that tiny spring (arrow). of the guns you choose to chisel up don’t have flat surfaces. This is common with many investment-cast guns.

My friend John Linebaugh commonly stones the surfaces of the powerful handguns he builds to overcome that wavy look before he applies his final finish to them. This takes a lot of time as it’s largely hand work. I like the work of L. D. Nimschke (1832-1904), a German engraver who worked in the U. S. around the time of our Civil War and later. I engraved a single-action 45 clone of a Colt (made by USPFMA) in Nimschke’s style.

The gun I did was easy to engrave because I went to the SHOT Show, spoke with the CEO of the then-new company and arranged to buy one of his guns "in the white." The gun came to me with no finish, no case coloring, but was in all other respects a finished firearm. I first worked up a load for the gun and filed the sights to match the load so the bullet impact was right where I wanted it. Then I set about engraving it, doing as careful work as I’ve ever done, and trying to match the style of Mr. Nimschke.

When I was satisfied I sent the gun off to have it case colored and blued by grand master Dan Cullity, the man who taught Doug Turnbull his skills. I acquired a set of genuine elephant ivory stocks for it. When the gun came back to me I was, and am, so stunned by the beauty of its finish I have yet

There’s obviously a lot more room for embellishment, but that’s not what the author wanted. " The portrait was done without a hammer, all by hand. The surrounding scrollwork was done in the same manner as on the Taurus cylinder. to turn the cylinder, much less fire it again. That was a case of everything working out just right. My only regret is that it’s not a genuine Colt. I had an early genuine Colt SAA that I considered engraving, but it had already been color-case-hardened.

Although the coloring was long gone, the hardness was not. If you have a gun like my old Colt that you want to engrave, and it’s been case-colored, you can forget about cutting into the hardened steel… unless you find the right people. I haven’t tried this, but you can apparently have the casehardened parts annealed and then engrave the gun. Then of course you’ll have to re-case-color it and reblue it when you’re done.

I sold my old Colt before I engraved it so I can’t comment on how well this technique works, nor who might be able to help you. At any rate that’s what I was told about how to engrave a color-case-hardened gun. Take a look at the scrolls I drew with pencil. The first four spirals are crudely drawn within the confines of the lines on the notebook paper. One scroll turns on itself and then a second one extends in the opposite direction from that, and on and on. The next step is to fill in the scrolls with… stuff.

This can be most anything, but it must be appropriate. Smaller scrolls are appropriate but some of them can appear like leaves. Don’t forget the gaps between each scroll. A leaf can come out there very easily. There’s also the starting point and the ending point to consider. By the time I’m done with the four scrolls they have lost much of their crudeness. The intentionally crudely drawn work ends up looking quite reasonable, and overlaid on a drawing of a 1911 .45 auto it looks fairly presentable.

Naturally, if I took more time they’d look better. When actually cutting steel I find it’s easy to make a clean, smooth cut even though the pencil drawing on the metal might be messy. The pencil work shows me where to go and gives some indication of the size of the scrolls. Although it’s possible to hide bad work with lots of busy cutting, the cleaner your cutting and the smoother the curves the better the job will look when all done.

I had a stainless Taurus five-shot .44 Magnum Tracker on hand that I wanted to engrave. I took the cylinder out, stripped it, and began with it. I drew some crude scrolls with a pencil, erasing until I got about what I wanted. Then I dug in with the graver. As you can see on the photos of the Taurus cylinder, just as with a drawing on paper I first cut the simple scrolls, fitting them into the space in a manner that I liked, and then filled them in.

I don’t show how I did the intermediate cuts but you can get the idea from my pencil work. Next up is to do the frame, but in order to get this story into print I’ll leave the rest of the work for a later date. However, to keep your interest up I’ve included a photo of the engraving on the floorplate of my custom .458 of my friend Cookie, to whom my book The Alaskan Retreater’s Notebook is dedicated.

His portrait is done in what’s called "bulino" style, done entirely without a hammer, but the scrollwork that surrounds his portrait is done exactly as detailed here on the Taurus. I hope you give engraving a try. You might find it’s easy. If it gives you fits you might come back to it at a later date. I first tried it when I was a much younger man and could not get a handle on it. Then when I had time I found I still had a strong desire to engrave and this time it worked well enough to satisfy me.

Best luck to you. AG