Archive for category Uncategorized
I need ideas for an ad campaign
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in Art, Uncategorized, engraving on August 22, 2008
Here’s your chance to help me.
This autumn I want to do a small advertising campaign to promote my hand engraving and custom knife business. Currently I have 3 things in the list I want to make for this campaign:
- iPod nano with engraved back (maybe even a pair – black & pink, for him and for her)
- Silver Zippo with full hand engraving
- Engraved custom knife
Campaign purpose is to promote hand engraving and custom knives, at the same time drive traffic to my blog and website, generate links and get up in Google ranks. I want to make it a campaign in disguise – there will be a competition and winners will get these prizes.
Now here’s what I need. Ideas for which competition(s) to make. That competition should also be something that’s useful. Be it something to do with marketing (best ideas what and where to market), products (what cool things to engrave, like iPods) or whatever.
How to make this campaign more… um, viral? I want it to spread. I will probably do a photo session (hire a model and the whole shebang) and a short video for it. More ideas are very welcome, also about photo and video!
People who will comment this post and have good ideas will get a small something from me. Can’t say right now what it is, as it’s creation is in very early phases. But it’s coming. Two sides with about 15mm diameter.
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Website: Custom knives and hand engraving
Knives and mokume gane
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in Uncategorized on July 6, 2007
It’s been a while since my last post, but no worries, I’m still working and creating ’stuff’. Past few weeks we’ve been making prototype knives, testing out some new technologies that can be used to make knives look more interesting and better. Last cool thing I ‘discovered’ was mokume gane, which means wood-grain in Japanese. It was actually developed at 17th century in Japan for katanas. Basically it’s the same as technology damascus (take many layers of different metals and forge-weld them together in very high temperature), but with different metals like brass, copper, silver, gold, palladium etc. and is used for touching up swords, knives etc. But some people also use this technology to create wedding rings and other very beautiful jewelry.
Here’s a little roundup of past few weeks:
Different designs that we’ve come up with. As you can see two blades still need to be finished and made into knives. The length of the largest blade is 22cm, so you know how long the others are.
Little close up of knife that has satin finished blade with hot-blued finger guard and pommel.
OK, now to mokume gane. Here’s how 30 layer brass/copper mokume billet looks like (red layers are copper, yellow ones are brass):
Here’s 60 layer mokume already used in knife (4th from the top of first image):
And here’s mokume billet with twist pattern, that probably will be used to make some parts of folding knife:
This one shows some problems, but hey, it’s our first one, we’ve still got a lot to learn!
During that time we also got/made two new machines – belt grinder and milling machine. I must say that the new belt grinder is just superb. It uses long belts – 75×200mm. I bought the best belts I found from 3M and now grinding is just a pleasure. These belts cut through metal like there’s no tomorrow… If you must know, then the belts are 3M Cubitron 777 and Trizact belts. Cubitrons are 80 and 120 grit, Trizacts start from 200 and go up to 2000. I used to 2000 one to finish the 2nd knife from that picture and it looks just awesome, unfortunately photos don’t show that very well.
First katana is completed!
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in Uncategorized on May 2, 2007
Here I let the photos speak for themselves. Enjoy!
