A while back we purchased a nice GEM-RX engraving machine and when all our excitement over the machine was faded, the machine just sat.   It sat some more, and a little more until we decided to offer engraving services for our awareness line.  However, we had a problem with getting the pretty flat sterling silver heart to stay in the same spot every time. What that meant was that I had to do an entirely new setup file every single time to make sure the engraving was perfect.  And in the beginning, there were a lot of do overs because the heart was not in the exact position.  I ordered different jigs all over the place and even tried to carve one of the plastic jigs to fit my hearts.  In the end, there seemed to be no jig that fit my little pretty sterling silver hearts just right.

I thought about how to fix this as I knew I could not offer these hearts with engraving with all the work that was going into it behind the scenes.  Then, a light bulb went off!  AH HA!  I took a wonderful course and the instructor had made a little handle for a needle using something like Jett Sett.  I had used it a few times prior to hold my work but it did not work well for me so the can was put somewhere safe (aka…lost)  and out of site.  I was not sure exactly how I was going to make use out of it, but I gave it a try.  It took a few times but what I ended up doing is making a nice flat thick oval out of the Jett Sett.  I than carefully placed the jet set on my current metal jig on the engraving machine.  First problem was that it was immediately setting because of the cold metal.  So I decided to retry again by making a nice flat over and pressing my charm to be engraved into it.  I also had to dig a channel underneath the charm so it could be easily removed.  I then carefully lined up the charm so it was straight and placed the Jett Sett into the meta jig on the engraving machine.  I pushed the Jett Sett so it would push through some of the holes in the jig so it would never move and stay in the same place every time.  It took some retries to make sure my charm was able to “snap” in place and be taken out but after that, I had myself a custom jig!

Since I created this custom jig, I have been able to follow suit with others and it had made a huge difference in the ability to add engravings to our Cancer Awareness Bracelets.   Once I had the setup completed, I was able to engrave without much issues so we added the engraved flat heart charm as an option for ordering our awareness bracelets.  We are still expanding what we can do with the engraving machine, so if you have ideas, let us know!