Laser Engraved Pens – Permanently Printed Pens

With so many new ways in which pens can be personalised we often tend to overlook one of the most time-honoured methods of achieving the printed message.

Engraved Pens as a promotional medium goes back many decades and in the early days this was achieved using a high speed rotating fine cutter on a mechanical machine that operated on a pantograph mechanism which mimicked the master pattern. I spent many years involved with this form of engraving and its simplicity coupled with its ability to produce repeatable high-quality results has endeared me to the process. this machining process was usually followed up with hand-filling the infill colour and the whole process was more of a craft than a science – absolutely brilliant!

One of the main disadvantages of machine engraving was ‘speed’. Great for one-offs but hopeless at producing engraved images quickly and cheaply, particularly when a lot of intricate detail is involved. Then along came laser engraving and it seemed the answer to many problems but in its early days it was a fairly blunt instrument. Over the last few years the process has evolved and machines now exist that can produce high quality at speed. The advantages of modern-day laser engraving are as follows

• Fast and relatively inexpensive
• Set-up time is minimal
• Repeatibility
• Perfect for fine detail
• The engraved finish can be the natural colour of the base metal or chemically ‘blacked’.
• Great for small orders as well as large ones

Like all processes it has its limitations and here at The Pen Warehouse we like to point these out as well just in casesome of our more excitable  distributors get carried away with enthusiasm and sell something we can’t deliver.

• Colour filling is not possible. You are limited to natural base metal colour and sometimes black
• There is very low relief in the engraved image and does not appear as three-dimensional as machine engraving
• Peripheral printing on round objects is best limited to line-of-sight. There are good technical reasons for this and certain logos can be fine but as a rule of thumb it should be avoided.

Well we hope the above gives you an idea of what laser engraving can do for you and whether you opt or traditional machine engraved pens or Engraved Pens you can be sure that the image produced will be a permanent one.