Thanks guys.
BigG, the reason I say everything by hand is the fact that nowadays, everyone wants it cheap. They polish everything with machines and round off sharp corners or round the factory lettering. Give a guy a gun and a buffing wheel and he can turn a thing of beauty into a pile of crap very quickly and cheaply. I'm sure you've seen some of these guns at shows before. The guns that the owner said " I polished it myself " and you stand there looking at it thinking " Ohhhh, I can tell ".
The engraving is another can of worms. Nobody wants to pay an artist an hourly wage to hand cut the materials needed to produce a work of art.
So, in todays word, people go the cheap route and have the gun etched or chemicaly engraved. They try to achieve something of beauty, a piece of art if you will, but it's just not the same.
There's well over 30 hours of art work on the above pictured gun. That's not even including the many hours of polishing I've done.
The engraver that I used did it all by hand and has been engraving guns since 1955.
Could I have sent it in to Smith for a etched engraving and saved me hundreds of dollars... You betcha. But I have what I feel is much more a work of art.
As a matter of fact, the engraver has done several guns for a blind man in New York over the years. I think it's wonderful that even a blind person could feel the engraving and understand the quality of the time and art involved.
That's all, I hope this all makes sense.
Maybe I'm just GUNKWAZY.
Jeff (GUNKWAZY)
