Engraving Sandstone with a Dremel Tool

[OkieNCognito]

Anyone had any experience engraving stone?

My wife and I are in the process of building a house and want to personalize our concrete patio by imbedding a sandstone rock with our name and date engraved into it. The rock we picked out was found on the property and is about a foot square, so the lettering will be fairly small. I played with my dremel tool using a grinding stone bit, but after an hour I had barely made a dent.

Will one of the $10 diamond or carbide tip bits allow me to engrave 15 to 20 letters within a reasonable amount of time (an hour or two) or should I just give up doing it myself?

I've considered taking the rock to a professional but it's just one of those things I feel would be more gratifying if I can do it myself. Am I way under-estimating this simple project?

 

[EdKing]

I would thing the carbide bit would do the job easily in sandstone. Dentists use carbide to drill teeth, and tooth enamel is much harder than sandstone.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

One of the conventional ways is with a sandblaster.

 

[Golfgar4]

Sounds like any of the solutions could be difficult. I can understand you wanting to do it yourself, but you might just be better off having someone with the equipment do it for you. You could take it to a monument dealer. Maybe they'd let you "assist" them. As an alternative, have you considered possibly doing something with a permanent paint?

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Harv is right - Understand they use sandblasters to 'carve' the letters on a gravestone. Might consider doing the design work yourself and taking it down to the local tombstone guy to get it cut.

For DIY, - did a project once on glass where I just cut black electrical tape to the shape I wanted and stuck it on. The sand from my little Sears unit wouldn't bite into the soft tape but blasted the glass just fine.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

I once engraved a piece of sandstone with a dog's name in 2" letters, and birth and death dates in smaller ones, with a Dremel and a set of diamond bits. It was pretty slow, but it worked. Home Depot had the diamond bits for the Black & Decker "Wizard" rotary tool for $25. I laid out the exact size and format of what I wanted on the stone in Word. I printed it out, taped the paper to the stone, and cut through the paper into the stone with the Dremel.

There is a Black & Decker Outlet in an outlet mall my wife likes. Once when I was in there they had bags of the diamond bits (broken out from the sets?) for $8 or $10.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

You could blast it with sand. But the expensive part after you have the sand blaster is the blast resist. That is the stuff you use to protect what you don't want to mar with the sand.

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/wroughtnharv/vwp?.dir=/pretties+flowers+rocks+etc&.src=ph&.dnm=MVC-004F.jpg&.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.yahoo.com/bc/wroughtnharv/lst%3f%26.dir=/pretties%2bflowers%2brocks%2betc%26.src=ph%26.view=t>This picture</A> started out as a piece of black countertop granite. I found the picture in a publishing suite I had. It was a color picture, quite pretty.

After some playing with it in black and white and doing some grey scales I ran off about six copies. I put blast resist over the granite piece. I then indexed the copies and glued one down to the blast resist. Using an exacto knive I cut out what I figured would be the lightest spots. I then dusted it with the sand blaster.

I glued down another copy and cut out the next lightest spots I saw. Then I blasted it again.

This picture took about six applications of the copies and corresponding blasts by the sand blaster. That's how I got the light to dark and the contrasts.

It's really fun. Of course for me the fun is in figuring out how to do something.

Some folks think I'm too free with my knowledge about how I do things. Maybe they're right. But the way I look at it is the same mind that figured that out will keep right on figuring. Besides that once I've got it figured out I lose interest.

Oh yeah, I thought I might have found a way to get rich off of this idea. You know, do pictures of favorite pets etc in granite at three to six hundred a pop.

But heck anyone can do that. So I came up with a new dream on how to get rich. I can't remember what it was but it was a good one. So was the one after that and the one after that and the one after that......etc.