Follow along as I hand engrave and set diamonds into Böker Scout Solingen

SarahLadd

SarahLadd

Joined
Nov 12, 2021
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320
Hi everyone,

If this is an inappropriate place for this sort of thread, let me know. I am about to embark on a journey to push my hand engraving skills further with tighter curves, finer shade lines and less forgiving tolerances. I'm making this up as I go and continuing to explore the art form learning what's working and what's not. Engraving is a long, tedious process under the microscope and it strains my brain to spend a lot of time doing one step of the process, so I mix it up by designing in chunks so I can watch things come together in a more enjoyable way. This will be my third knife, the last knife I engraved having been a practice piece for this specific knife I chose, and I will incorporate diamond pave in places as accents.

I am skipping the pencils this time around. I did scan smoke prints, however, even though I thought I pressed the tape with fair accuracy, the border has been difficult to align to a great deal of perfection. I have gotten it close enough and I think I will use artistic license to adjust the borderlines visually as I go.

https://imgur.com/a/A7fwNMS

After a lot of fussing I have the transfer ready to go.

https://imgur.com/gQZaRaL
 
Look forward to seeing you work on this. For all the engraved work I've seen in my life, I really have scant idea how it's actually done.
 
Looking forward to seeing you progress on this project. It’s good to see a fire within.
 
I'm back with some diamond setting. After engraving the border and re-transferring the design, I've cut seats for and seated my selected diamonds for this bolster portion.

https://imgur.com/a/qzb4CEM

Diamonds laid out with estimated spacing.

https://imgur.com/a/8pkZFNP

Depth is achieved with a round bur and the seat is defined with a 90 degree bur.

https://imgur.com/a/vtTEFFH

Diamonds are all now seated. Some percussive adjustments are made to level the tops of the diamonds.

Now that the stones are in there, I get to begin engraving the design.
 
How are the stones set? I don't see bezels or prongs, nor are there holes for cleaning.
 
Bill DeShivs said:
How are the stones set? I don't see bezels or prongs, nor are there holes for cleaning.
Click to expand...
The stones aren't truly "set", they are just sunk into the metal snugly enough that they aren't going to shift when I cut the border around them and define the prongs. There is a 90 degree bearing for each stone, the stones were selected slightly larger than the setting, angled in and "snapped" into place. You could think of this as a sort of gypsy set or flush set. This same method is how I begin a French fishtail pave ring in gold or platinum. A punch hammered on the stone tables can help level them or bring them a little further down. These are methods of setting that I would only ever do with diamonds, every other gemstone would require different setting method and very delicate care. They're gonna hang out there in this state for a while as I engrave around them. There's not gonna be holes under these, that's impractical. A soft bristle toothbrush loaded with a small quantity dish soap gently scrubbed over the knife as a spot clean would be my best recommendation for care. The nice thing about diamonds is they continue to sparkle and display fire even when dirty- the magic of double refraction- which is another good reason why they are such an unbeatable choice for pave on a brass knife.
 
I'm trying to improve the quality of my shade marks. I think I'm getting better a little bit at a time. You can see here in this image that I have sanded over the surface a little bit (I'm using 1000 grit here), and the distortion on the surface around the diamonds that was caused by seating them. I haven't decided how much I want to sand around them as I'll be cutting a lot away around them.

https://imgur.com/a/FyZr9ql

Throwing some paint into the marks to see how it's looking. Not too shabby, I'm not displeased with this result.

https://imgur.com/a/Lagj0pI
 
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