Here are two quick engravings on memory sticks. The engraving style is called ‘piddling’, or if I want to sound expensive, then ‘double bevel’ engraving.

As these memory sticks are made from extremely soft metal, this is the only style that can be done decently on them. Can’t do any fine lines/detail on them. I drew the design on as I started to engrave, so not much preparing was needed.

Here are two quick engravings I had to do. These little projects are really good for both design and technique practice. Relatively small and fast projects.

The memory stick winner is known now. I used rand function from ruby shell to determine the winner and my darling wife was looking over me so I couldn’t cheat:

[21:54:47] comp:~ irb
>> rand(24) + 1
=> 8

The winner is commenter number 8, who is Uthay. I will contact you and send out the memory stick as soon as I get your address.

Thank you all for participating! Watch this space to see the next competition (might be a good idea to subscribe to feed or email updates).

Next time I’m back with more delicious prize.

UPDATE: giveaway is now over. Thanks for participating.

Did that get your attention? Good, because now is the chance to get free hand engraved 2GB USB memory stick. To participate simply leave a comment to this post stating “Me wants it” or anything with your email so I can contact the winner.

On 21st of Nov 2008 I will pick a random commenter and send the memory stick to him/her. Commenting once is enough, thank you.

This is what you are getting (measures 2.6×1.5cm).

If you made this far into the post I must say that this stick was a testpiece to see how good it is to engrave one. Conclusion – not that good. The metal is extremely soft and it’s very hard to do fine engraving. Also, I use acetone for design transfer and this melts the plastic. You can see from photos the problematic places.

But hey, it’s free and loaded with few of my knifemaking and engraving videos.

Next victim is either iPod Shuffle or spoon… Hmm.

I’ve bought a few things to see whether they are engrave-able or not. If they work out well, then, note this, I’m going to give them away to my readers. For free. Yes. Really.

If I screw them up, then I’ll have a few more shooting targets, or maybe someone would still want them.

The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to give them away. The simplest would be to pick random commenter from people who’ve commented on the ‘Give Away’ post, but maybe someone has a better idea? 

OK, here they are. ‘Top’ things are 1GB iPod Shuffle and pqi 2GB memory stick.

Actually I bought Shuffle just to test whether this aluminium is engrave-able and how the effect looks like. If it is good enough I’ll probably buy iPod Nano for one of the next give aways. I have a few spoons too, but not sure which of them are made of metal that can be engraved.