The initial monogram design didn't take that long, only a couple of weeks on and off to make the 'in your face' Dragon 1, and a lot of that was mostly about tweaking the wings' phalanges. It was engraved before Christmas on my last blank head. I ordered more blanks from Etsy, and they were going to take several weeks to turn up, so I had the time to experiment with other variants. Some of the time was spent making simulations in Xara and Xara3D, often as wax impressions. One of the reasons for using Xara3D was to evaluate how well a shallow relief shape would be seen in different colours and shades of wax. The clear answer was that mid-toned colours work best, because they allow a wide enough contrast range for well-defined highlights and shadows. I also concluded that if it wasn't too much hassle, a two-colour wax impression would be nice. I haven't got the knack for single colours yet, so two will have to wait!

I did have a slight concern that an 'in your face' dragon being a monogram might get submerged, and that was what lay behind the Subtle Dragon track. But as a unique personalised image based on my initials, I think Dragon 1 still works, as I don't really think the resemblance of Dragon 1 to a monogram is that obscure that most people looking at it for more than a brief glance wouldn't notice it. Arguably Dragon 2 where the wingtips didn't hit the floor and the 'J' perch didn't have an obvious curve at the bottom, could make that a little harder to notice.
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The Subtle Dragon didn't take long at all to draw, only three text characters converted to shapes which needed only minimal editing. There were only two shapes to engrave having integrated the 'J' into the 'M', but my toolpathing app can only handle a single depth per shape, and in the wax I wanted the dragon's tail and the 'J' to swap over in the 3rd dimension so the dragon's tail appeared behind the bottom of the 'J's curve, while keeping the rest of the dragon's body in front of the rest of the 'M'.

So I needed to hand edit the gcode output from the toolpath app to get the middle leg of the 'M' to slope downwards into the brass, but it took longer it should because I'd forgotten that the toolpath app worked in centimetres, but the gcode output was in millimetres, so my search for the coordinates I'd recorded to identify them in the gcode for the relevant nodes/paths to tweak weren't found until I realised I needed to convert them to mm first!

As soon as I did they all popped up and the editing was then completed and checked in a gcode visualiser in under an hour, and the engraving was done the following day and went perfectly.

The subtle dragon took just over an hour to engrave, the other two took about an hour and 45 minutes each because their engraved area was larger overall. There is a rule of thumb when using a cutting bit, which is that the depth of any cut shouldn't exceed the radius of the tool bit, so to cut deeper you need to do it in stages. Because my cutter was only 0.5mm in diameter, I elected to make the step cutting depth only 0.2mm to reduce bending stress on it, and in Dragon 1 the deepest shape was 1.0mm down from the surface of the brass, so that shape was 'coloured in' with the bit five times over, dropping 0.2mm per pass. The shallowest was 0.6mm, so needed three passes, and a set of intermediate shapes needed four passes each.