Need Insight on Marking Blades

C

catfish7966@yahoo.co

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Nov 11, 2008
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I am new to making knives and am looking for advice on etching vs stamping your maker stamps on blades. First off, is one way better than the other? Second, does anyone know where to find plans for building an etcher? Thanks for any insight.
 
You can make one like this ( parts from radio shack or a good electronics store say 50-60 bucks) or get a cheap 2 amp 12volt trickle charger and modify it. Splice on to the 12VAC lines going from the transformer to the rectifier and run them to a set of terminals on one end of a dpdt switch. Then cut the wires going from the rectifier to the outputs and connect the rectifier side wires to the terminals on the other end of the DPDT sw. Then connect the wires going to the outputs to the center terminals of the sw. Leave the clamp on the positive output lead and make a 1/2"x 1" steel pad and drill and tap a small screw to it to connect the negative lead to it and connect a plastic handle to it also. Take a small piece of felt and rubber band it over the steel pad. Now you have an etcher. Use salt water for a etch solution. Damp the felt with it and take the excess moisture off with a sponge. Place it on DC and hold to your stencil for 5 seconds and remove for a couple seconds. Do this 10 or 12 times. Then if you want the mark black turn sw to ac and do it 5 times for 5 seconds. Get your stencil from TUS or there is another guy everyone says is great with great prices but, I can't remember his name. You can also make them yourself but, not as good.

etcher.jpg
 
PS. you should put a 1 amp fuse in the 110ac line and if you buy a rectifier a 5 amp one will probably not cost much more than a 2 amp and be tougher. If I was to make another though I would just mod a cheap charger from a cheapo auto parts store.
 
I started out trying with an Etcher to getting a stamp and I am much happier with the results from the stamp. I would recommend if you go down the etcher route then get a professionally done stencil.

Etching
Pros:
Can be done across curved surfaces?
Can be done after Heat Treating
Cons:
Not as deep a mark
Depending on stencil not as clear as a stamp

Stamping
Pros:
Nice deep clear mark
Cons:
Hard to do on non flat surfaces (ie on your bevels or hollow grind)
Must be done before HT so if you sand too much might become shallow in spots etc
 
I'll add some pros and cons.

A benefit to using a stencil is you can typically get a lot more information in your mark - name, city, etc. A stamp has less resolution. You can set the etcher to remove metal, too. I don't use one so can't describe how that works but I've seen some really nice, deeply etched marks.

I use a stamp, with virtually no real information on it, so no one down the line will ever have a clue who made my knives. They'll know someone did, but that will be the extent of what they can learn from my stamp. But I continue to use it because a) I've had sloppy results trying to etch stuff and b) it's "traditional" and I like it. :D
 
By the way I used Cris Crawford's tutorial to built mine. I highly recommend a professional stencil. It works best for me to get my knife handened and tempered and then sanded to about 220 or so then etch. The higher grits remove any small discoloration around the etch.
 
I use to etch but now i stamp and i love the results from a nice clean stamped makers mark.
 
Thanks for the heads up, I read Ed's article and am pleased to note I'm not doing anything obviously stupid. Ed talks about whether to stamp cold or hot steel, and Ed does his hot. I've always stamped my blades cold, in the annealed state just before HT and my stamps are holding up fine. I've been thinking about using an older stamp that spells out my last name in addition to my initials mark. I'll probably give that a try next batch and see if I like it.

Interesting how this works, I've ended up with a "collection" of stamps over the years. I have my initials logo in two sizes, and a stamp with my name spelled out in italics that I used for a while (got it from TKS). When I first started I just used individual letters to stamp DCL in the ricasso, and whenever I see one of those old knives I get a kind of thrill. ;)

There have been several attempts to catalog makers' marks, but they never seem to get any traction. I think a wiki somewhere that could be updated by everyone would be a valuable resource. There would have to be a way to visually identify a mark, then find the human behind it. I don't have any smart ideas how to organize the pictures yet, or even where to host such a thing. Anyone have any suggestions? Think such a thing could fly? Or maybe there is one somewhere that I don't know about?
 
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