Basse Taille Coloratus™

Originally used with hand cut surfaces Basse Taille enamelling has always been a rarity due to the difficulty of carving surfaces by hand. Mechanically generated Low Relief Engine Turning did little to improve this since each job still needed a hand cut master pattern, and worse the skill required to use a Brocade Engine at commercially acceptable standards is considerable and few enough people have the skills of ordinary engine turning let alone good enough to do Low Relief.

When Pledge & Aldworth developed the CAD/CAM Engine Turning System in 1992 the situation became different. Initially the cost of enamelling rulled out the possibility but eventually in 1998 a first commercial product bearing CAD/CAM Engine Turning and Enamel was successfully launched and once David Pledge was given the freedom to specify the whole design including enamelling, Basse Taille Coloratus™ was the next logical step. This was not without technical problems, laying one colour over another has many difficulties, firstly getting the first layer level without stoning through and then finding a colour that is chemically compatible with it's bedfellow.

Much credit must go to the vitreous enamellers who can produce this kind of work, and only the very best can. However it is now possible to use synthetic materials to do this much more easily. Only a few firms have this technique, one is Ashfield Dean Ltd who developed their own process with some people from Switzerland. The layers seperate automatically to give the graded colour. This is an advance on vitreous enamel.

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We will add pictures as soon as we can. We have now developed a further refinement giving very accurate control over colour placement which allows unlimited colours to create an almost holographic oil painting effect. This will in future take the name Basse Taille Coloratus™ and is a copyright process available exclusively from us, under patent application. All rights reserved.