Should illustration
On completion of this little 'art' work I realised that not only am I never going to make anything of any real note, but the process is just a way for me to demystify certain processes that others handle with great aplomb. It is nice to take things to experts to have made, but also to work through the issues wrapped up in doing it yourself. Four days to engrave the little badge. Oh, it would have been so easy to get a stencil made and quickly sandblast it on. Instead coding to drive the engraving machine and fruitless attempts to get it to work. As always it is knowing how, in this case that the carbide bit need only breathe on the glass to get the marking neat and uniform. Too much depth caused the mill to burn out and fail half way round. Any attempt to restart just created more mess. Ten sheets later this was worked out and just .01 mm on the Z axis makes all the difference in the world.
The ability to cut glass and do the lead work is bound to come in useful later and at the second go it became satisfactory. Just hard work figuring out how to bend the lead into a nice curved shape around the glass. Simply forming across ever thinner brass rods proved better than any mechanical device devised. The glass stringers were bent and fused at their ends. Lampworking, bead making, and glass sculpting is uncomplicated to start off and maybe after many years of practice would produce items of much greater significance, but this is sufficient for this illustration.