Inlaying Gold

[Andy S]

Kerry Brogan asked me to post a photo of this engraving before the gold was in. Why, I'm not sure. But here it is anyhow and also a picture of the front side nearly finished. I may add some more shading to the gold areas yet. I thought I would take a moment to share how I'm undercutting the pockets for the gold for some of you who may be interested. I am using an NSK high speed rotary tool that I got from Steve Lindsay for background removal. Steve showed me how to make some really small burrs from the worn out carbide burrs. While still mounted in the rotary tool you just hit the foot pedal and touch the burr to your diamond hone as in the sketch below. You can take it down to an absolute needle point if you want to. Then after it stops spinning apply finger pressure to the burr and swipe it across the diamond hone to put a flat on it. These work great for getting into small tight corners where a flat tool doesn't work well. But the added bonus is that they work real well for undercutting pockets for gold. And they are fast at it as well. Steve did a gold wire inlay for some whiskers on a tiger engraving using .005" wire and said he did the undercutting with the small burrs. Because the point is so small they rarely want to grab and jump out of the cuts. Really works well. If your not using these rotary type tools you should try them. The NSK runs at 325,000 RPM and has lots of power.