Hi everyone. I thought I share this here, even if it might not raise a very high interest.

A few weeks ago I had a discussion on another forum regarding spring loaded engraving vs drag engraving. I opted for DIY drag engraving, instead of DIY rotating spring loaded one for several reasons, one of them was the simplicity to make these as well as the usability. I decided to make one through using simple parts I found in my drawers. Everything went very fast, except the 3D printing which took 4,5 hours to finish, but after that, I had a very nice tool, which I find a lot of use of whenever I feel I need to engrave fine lines of text into any material in the future. So far I have only tested with acrylic, aluminium and steel but since it works fine with those, I guess it would work fine with anything in between as well, which might be soft plastic and brass. I don't think it works on wood, that needs a rotating cutter. Anyway, I had a few broken end mills which I ground down to be engraving needles and it turned out to work very nice. I made a short video about this as well, welcome to have a look. If anyone is interested to make a copy of this, I can give more details, and can also share the FreeCAD file or the stl for the 3D printed part. My spindle is 65mm in diameter and the outer diameter is 85mm, so the files I have fits only for this type of spindle holder.



DIY drag engraver for my DIY CNC-z07_2611_2k-jpg DIY drag engraver for my DIY CNC-mov_2621-jpg DIY drag engraver for my DIY CNC-z07_2442_2k-jpg DIY drag engraver for my DIY CNC-z07_2413_2k-jpg DIY drag engraver for my DIY CNC-z07_2409_2k-jpg

The bearing is a long linear bearing for 8mm shaft. The ER11 collet chuck holder shaft is 100mm long and of course, 8mm diameter.
Simple, easy to make and will be used a lot when rotating engraving bits might not be the best solution, for example shallow thin lines and text or figures.

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