DIY spring loaded engraving tool holder

[Bob La Londe]

Originally Posted by Bluedog I would like to buy one from someone at a decent price. I think $400 is a bit pricey.

I bought one from Swain for what I consider to be a very reasonable price. If he included a fancy piece of paper with some instructions, a couple different springs, and some documented suggestions he could easily sell them for more. It took some experimentation to make it do what I wanted. I found for plastic, soft steel, and 5052-T6 aluminum I got a pretty good engraving by NOT using an engraving tip. The engraving tip tended to cut into the material too much. I took a broken tungsten end mill, chucked it up in my mill and put a dome on it with a fiber cutoff wheel in my rotary tool. With the rotary tool spinning one way at 10K and the mill spinning the other way at 10k it did the job. The best I could get was a dome, but it did a pretty good job as a drag engraver in the spring loaded tool holder I got from Swain.

I got the idea to go with a very dull engraver because of the angle of the point in the picture of another spring loaded engraver I saw on Ebay. (also a pretty reasonable price)

Here is the tip that inspired mine. Theirs is diamond point, but tungsten carbid seemed to work just fine.



I wanted to see what I could do so I took another broken end mill and chucked it up in my rotary tool and took it over to the bench grinder. I was able to put a conical point on each end. One very wide angle, and one a little steeper. The actual point is not surper sharp. I was able to get decent results on a variety of base materials with the moderate cone. I did shorten and reduce the spring pressure pretty substantially by cutting off several coils and then stretching the spring to maintain compression. I made satisfactory skinny line engraving on aluminum, the steel side case of a cheap knife, a couple deep sockets, and on a simulated wood plastic covered pressed paper box.

It was all done by drag engraving. I never got great results by spinning up the tool.

As a side note. I have a couple rotary tools in the shop. The two I tried for this were a Sears Crapsmen, and a Dremel. The Dremel was by far the better tool and put my points closer to center when grinding the tungsten mill to a point. It was still not perfect, but I actually had to turn my engraving bit to see it was not perfectly centered. With the Sears tool I could see the point was not centered from down the street and around the corner. For those thinking about using a rotary tool for other projects its quite obvious that price makes a difference. A local jeweler I know spends quite a lot more than the drice of the variable speed Dremel for his rotary tools. (They also spin faster)


This is more pressed than scratched in the surface of the box, which considering the material is a desireable result.


This is a nice scratching/etching on the 5052 aluminum sheet. Except for dressing the edges to fit neatly under my clamps this is a warped unpreprocessed piece of scrap left over from another project.

Anyway, with a little experimentation I got some great results from Swains spring tool, and it didn't cost anywhere near $400.

[zonker]

I was just looking at this thread because I am working on some cutting on some somewhat warped 1/4 inch birch and it doesnt take much of a warp to go from lettering to hole all the way through. Just thought I would throw out that dremel makes a screwon chuck that makes the tool holder end of it abit more adjustable so you could use a bigger selection of tools.