Thank you all for your encouragement and advise so far!
A previous commenter suggested I create my own engraving jaws to hold a silver ingot in place for both effacing and engraving operations.
Since I knew I needed something like this to progress further working in silver, I finally gathered the necessary courage to work in aluminum!
Working with aluminum on the Taig was a lot simpler and a lot less dangerous than I thought it would be. What prompted me to try was, ironically, the ease with which the fly cutter had also shaved the top of my Taig vise during my first attempt to efface the artwork from both sides of a silver ingot.
I took some hours last week to square the aluminum block prior to actually carving the block into my jaws.
I should have taken pictures while doing the actual carving this week but I was simply enjoying myself way too much to pause at each step. That, and since my camera was out of power and I had lost my USB charging cord over summer vacation, so I had to wait a week for a replacement!
I will, instead, insert another post later detailing all of the design steps. They are very simple really, making it highly worthwhile to pursue as a very first work in a hard metal such as Aluminium. It was my very first work, it could be yours too:
My very first aluminum piece: silver ingot vise jaws!
I actually worked over the block symmetrically, the real breakthrough coming when I could split the block so that I could mill the insides down to meet exactly in the center of the ingot.
Inside view of the ingot jaws...
As you can see, the intended operation is as follows:
Side view demonstrating the ingot jaws.
As the jaws close together, the ingot will be held tightly by compression, because I intentionally milled the insides to meet not quite .005 inches short of the center. I can insert a feeler gauge into the vertical gap underneath the ingot where the jaws meet, for a better fit which will prevent the ingot from buckling upward. The mill step is .06 inches deep, the ingot is .10 inches thick, leaving .04 inches available for machining of the ingot surface.
Top view demonstrating the ingot jaws.
I just simply can’t wait to try them out on another fine silver ingot!
P.S. I highly recommend trying Extra Virgin Olive Oil, First Cold Pressing, as a cutting oil that for small jobs such as mine performs nearly as well as Tap Magic cutting oil. I’ve tried each during this operation. Tap Magic causes only slightly less chatter, so an organic subsitute with no bad-smelling fumes to breathe is something I would rather use instead even at the cost of slightly faster wear. Either choice is considerably better than dry machining, let me tell you.
