Speaking of jewelry engraving, do you know when the craft of engraving began to develop? Probably thousands of years ago, the Egyptians began to carve simple designs into the stones and walls of their caves. Today, the craft of carving has evolved into an art. There are some basics that you need to know before learning jewelry engraving.
1. What is jewelry engraving?
To put it simply, jewelry engraving is the process of carving designs on the surface of gemstones or other precious metals. Because jewelry engraving is often used to create smaller pieces of jewelry, such as rings and earrings, the precision required for jewelry engraving is very high. While the process may sound complicated, with the advancement of technology, we have more tools that can increase efficiency while ensuring engraving accuracy. Of course, you still need some practice to learn jewelry engraving.
2. Types of engraving
If you want to make a classification of the types of jewelry engraving, it can be roughly divided into two, one is hand engraving and the other is machine engraving. The following is a brief introduction to these two processes.
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The first is hand engraving. Hand engraving is the process by which an engraver uses the most specialized engraving tools to carve or cut the surface of a gemstone or other material. Since the motifs are carved by hand, it is only natural that many tools are required. Here are just a few of them: different sizes and shapes of carving tools, pliers to hold the material to be carved, etc. If the pattern to be carved is very complex, then having good tools is not enough, but also requires the craftsman to have years of experience in carving.
Then there is machine engraving. Although hand engraving has existed for a long time, the efficiency of hand engraving is indeed a bit slow. So with the development of technology, the emergence of machine engraving is naturally not surprising. In fact, most of the jewelry carvings we see nowadays are carved by machines. In terms of the current level of technology, the most advanced machine engraving technology, is laser engraving. Laser engraving technology is characterized by the fact that the engraving tool and the engraving material will not produce direct contact. The high-intensity laser beam will be directly on the surface of the engraving material to carve out the set pattern. Jewelry engraved using machine engraving is more accurate than hand engraving. And there is a high probability that no accidents will happen when engraving, such as engraving the wrong pattern, or the depth of engraving is wrong, and so on. Moreover, nowadays the machine engraving technology has been able to do engraving on any jewelry material.
3. If you want to try your hand at jewelry engraving
If you want to try engraving jewelry yourself, you can go for a practical engraving machine. Nowadays it is the pneumatic engraver that are more popular in the market. You can take a comprehensive look at the following ranges while buying an engraving machine.
- Type of engraving tool the machine is equipped with
- Engraving mode of the machine
- Engraving accuracy
- durability
- Length of warranty period
4. What are the actual steps involved in jewelry engraving?
If you are interested in the craft of jewelry engraving, then you must be very eager to carve a piece of jewelry of your own. Next, let’s formally introduce the specific steps of jewelry engraving.
You need to be clear about what kind of finished product you want to carve
If you’re not inspired at the moment, you can go online and search for more jewelry styles and then adapt them to your own ideas.
Choose the engraving material you want
In fact, when a novice is just starting out in jewelry carving, it is not appropriate to directly engage in the carving of gemstones. On the one hand, because most of the gemstones are generally higher hardness, novice carving up more difficult. On the one hand, it is because if the cost of the gemstone is higher, the financial loss caused is also higher. So when you just start carving, you can try to choose some not so hard texture, and the price is not so expensive metal for carving materials.
Carve the pattern you want on the engraving material
Before proceeding with the formal engraving, you can make a simple depiction of the pattern you want to engrave on the surface of the engraving material. All you need to do is trace the pattern you want on the metal with a pencil. There are two things you need to keep in mind here. The first one is that you’d better not use too much force while using the pencil, as this may leave excess marks on the metal that will be hard to remove at a later date. The second is that if the metal you are engraving is darker in color, you can use a white colored pencil to draw the pattern you want on it so that you can see it more clearly in the follow-up.
Get out your carving tools and carve
When it comes to the choice of carving tools, you can choose to use the most primitive carving tools, purely manual carving knives. But very few people use this kind of engraving tool nowadays. Most people nowadays go for a home made jewelry engraving machine because of the convenience (for more information on how to choose a suitable jewelry engraving machine for yourself, you can go back and read the first half of the article). Before using a jewelry engraving machine, you’d better read the manual of the jewelry engraving machine clearly in case there are some surprises in the follow-up.
Carve and carve
After you have carved out the initial shape of the piece you want with your jewelry engraving machine’s, you can keep adjusting it against your design drawings while you are engraving. Once you’ve almost finished your piece, you can give the jewelry a final polish.