Wire eroded blanks from Engine Turned Sheets

Where price is really critical, methods must be developed to make it possible to produce the engine turning at minimal cost. The project illustrated on this page is a set of matching enamelled gents accessories - cufflinks, key ring and money clip - to accompany a fountain pen which was not enamelled but had the same engine turned pattern.

Using engine turning in this way is an excellent way to bring a set of products together as a set, especially where the over-all design of the products are not able to be easily integrated due to functional differences.

Cuff Link Blanks, wire eroded after engine turning, ready for removal from the sheet.
Note: This sheet got photographed because it was a partial reject. The missing blanks have been used, the remaining ones were rejected. We cut 36 of these sheets with about two or three partial rejects.

The cuff link insert blanks above have been cut on sheets 50mm wide, 30 blanks per sheet, 9 sheets simultaneously, producing about 270 blanks for less than £1 UKP per individual blank, plus the cost of wire eroding the blanks from the sheets. The engine turning is laid out on the sheets with locating marks cut at the same time so that the sheets can all be drilled and piled up for accurately wire eroding many sheets at the same time after egnine turning.

A test key fob blank, with clear enamel to show the design. The production version was blue, and the pattern was correctly centred, unlike here.

In the above illuatration, the insert, a larger one in this case, has been set into a recessed plate and enamelled with clear synthetic as a test piece for the side of a high quality key ring.

For scale, the octagon in this image was 30mm across the flats outside shape. So on your screen you are seeing it at about 4 times magnification if your screen is around 100 pixels per inch, typical of a CRT display.

The octagonal section cap and body tubes for pen that was produced to match the accessories. Unit cost per pen was about £18 UKP for the engine turning in 2002.

We produced 500 sets of these items, and, very unusually, Pledge & Alworth arranged for the manufacture of the accessories which was done in the UK.