A while back a member here offered to engrave a tube for me for $60. I though that was a little too much for something I could do myself. How hard could it be right?
When I tell people who ask about using a Dremel not to unless they want it to look shitty, it's because I tried & know it looks shitty. I'll also tell you not to bother with stamps if you don't want it to look shitty. You could get away with them on softer AL if you put a mandrel in the tube to keep from deforming it, but you won't get the letters straight or evenly spaced without a lot of practice. I tried to stamp a VIN on a hard steel trailer axle (requirement here in NC to get tags for a homemade trailer) and a 3 lb hammer on the stamp wouldn't leave a mark. The little 'buzz type' electric engravers - maybe depending on your handwriting skills & some practice controlling it you might get fair results. My attempt was slightly less shitty than the Dremel.
All that is about pretty though. Nothing says your engraving has to be pretty - just large & deep enough.
So, since $60 is too expensive, but cheap DIY methods look like cheap DIY methods, I figured I'd get an engraver & do it right.
So to save $60, I spend $189 on a "vintage" [read: crusty old POS] engraving machine. No big deal right? I'm building multiple cans, doing 80% lowers w/o selector markings already there, etc. At $60 a pop, I'm still ahead.
So the vintage pantograph engraver shows up & I'm ready to start using it. Even though it has no instructions and I've never seen one before, how hard can it be? Well first "vintage" means not in working order and in serious need of a complete teardown, cleaning, oiling & reassembly. OK that's done & I'm ready to engrave something. OH, you need font sets. Right, forgot about those. I'll just pick up a used set on eBay for cheap. But wait, I decided to save a couple bucks on a "vintage" machine and it needs "vintage" font sets that are the right size for it. Well not only are vintage font sets more expensive because they're rare, they have the added bonus of being guaranteed to be missing some letters (who needs the letter 'Y' anywa....). So another $150 for 2 vintage font sets - both incomplete but each one has enough to combine and make one complete set. That would have been a wonderful plan if the letters were the same size. Same font, but different sizes.
So now I'm $340 into this project to save $60 and still can't engrave anything.
So I stumble across another incomplete vintage set that's a mix of all sorts of stuff. It has what I need to make 2 working (not complete, but at least 1 of every character) for both sets. $60 - $35 I got back out of the remainder, so $25 more getting me up to $365 sunk into this. Lot of good commercial silencers on the market - that are already engraved - for that.
So now I'm in business. Remember, I've never seen a pantograph engraving machine before let alone used one. How hard can it be? Well, without a little practice, it's real damn hard. Looks simple, but it's also terribly easy to let the stylus slip out of the well worn "vintage" font and drag an errant mark across your work. Luckily you can predict exactly when this will happen - it will be when you are near the last character of the last line of engraving. The 1st one I did was a 6061 AL tube. Easy enough to blast it and start over. 2nd one was grade 9 Ti. I wnated to Cerakote this one first, then engrave so the engraving would contrast with the black and look more like a commercial unit.
So on the 3rd line stylus slips and I had enough pressure on the tool to make an ugly line across the letters I just did. But now it isn't just a spot fix. All the Cerakote has to come off because the stuff won't stick to itself once cured. Blasting is the only way to remove it once it's cured also. So blast, clean, re-coat, cure, re-engrave. This time I'm being much more careful and the stylus doesn't slip out of a character. This time the work moves and offsets a line halfway through. Of course, last line again. Why does last line matter? Because it's very difficult to drag engrave Ti. To make a letter you keep retracing the same character over & over applying a little more tool pressure with each pass. It takes a long time to just get one character done - not just one pass & the engraving is there. 1st pass barely gets thru the cerakote. 10th pass is probably approaching .003 deep. But back to the work moving - the "vintage" engravet has a self-centering vise, but no work holding to go with that vise. I was using long roll pins squeezed in (you'd have to see it to understand) to hold the tube. A little too much pressure & the tool digs into the work moving it instead of dragging the tool across it - the reason for all the light passes instead of one heavy pass. So now I'm spending an afternoon fabricating hold downs for this little vise (because I wanted to save a few $ buying a "vintage" engraver). So now the tube has been blasted, cleaned, coated with cerakote for the third time. Cerakote isn't free. Using an airbrush doesn't use a lot, so say $10 in wasted material.
So not counting the hours & hours of refurbishing the machine or stripping & recoating the tubes or engraving and re-engraving, I have how much in this project? I'm losing count....$375ish?
But I saved $60 paying a pro to do it right......
So here's how it turned out:
I think it looks pretty good. I wouldn't call it a $375 engraving job, but I'm happy with it.
Moral of the story: if someone offers to engrave your tube for $60 - and you want it to look professionally engraved - jump all over that!
