Why Choose to Engrave your Wedding Ring?
For Centuries, people have added meaningful inscriptions to the inside or the outside of their rings and/or wedding rings. Often with short, personal messages of love, dedications of loyalty or faithfulness, or simply adding the date or year of the wedding. Not only can this bring extra meaning to the ring itself for the wearers, it can also offer enduring records of sentimental history when handed down as a family heirloom.
As engraving processes have been combined with technology, engravings such as fingerprints, symbols and handwriting copy and small artworks have become more easily available to incorporate into the design of the engraving in addition to traditional text inscriptions.
Even if you did not have time to think about having your rings engraved ready for your wedding day, you might still like to have them engraved as a special anniversary gift, valentine’s gift, or as part of a renewal of vows ceremony. Even as a receiver of a wedding ring as an heirloom, you may wish to mark this special gift with a meaningful inscription.
Updating an existing ring with a new inscription can also be perceived as a heartfelt and eco-friendly way to uplift an existing piece of jewellery with renewed or deeper meaning, increasing its wearable longevity. It can avoid the extraction of new, precious metal material and chemical processes often involved in gifting a brand new piece of jewellery.
What types of Wedding Ring Can be Engraved?
Most plain, sturdy, fully round, metal wedding bands with no decorative embellishments or stones can be engraved by us (excluding tungsten).
White gold wedding rings will also generally require re-plating. This service will be at additional cost.
If your ring has become misshapen over time, then please ask if our re-shaping and re-finishing service is available for your ring as we can only engrave your ring if the round shape is not distorted.
If your ring is scratched, then please ask about polishing options (optional).
Wedding rings with decorative embellishments and/or stone settings may or may not be suitable for engraving on our machines. Please ask about your specific requirements. Because of the extra set up time, there will be an extra charge for engraving rings that have decorative embellishments and/or stone settings.
What can be engraved on a Wedding Ring?
We offer many options for what types of engraving you can add to your jewellery, allowing you to use your imagination freely for true, meaningful personalisation. These options include standard text engraving in most freely available fonts, symbols, your own artwork, fingerprint, handwriting, patterns or logos, monograms etcetera.
What you can engrave on your own ring will be dependent upon with and size of wedding ring, whether there are any other settings and/or embellishments on the ring, placement of hallmark etc.
Most rings can fit around 30-35 (characters and spaces) of single line text on either a plain outside or inside of the ring. We offer other options such as handwriting copy, symbols, fingerprint engraving and more if the engraving area of your ring is large enough.
Can you engrave on the inside and outside of the Wedding Ring?
Most plain, sturdy and fully round wedding bands can be engraved on the inside or outside or both sides of the ring.
Prior to accepting your payment for our engraving service, we will ask you to offer a clear description and clear photographs of your ring to check as to whether it is suitable to be engraved on our machines. These questions are asked in order to save your time and wasted postage fees if your request is not achievable.
Why choose us to Engrave your Jewellery?
Insurance.
All prices include insurance within our workshop up to a maximum of £750 per item. Please see our terms and conditions for further information.
For postal services, we recommend that you use a service that insures your ring to the replacement value, as we cannot be held responsible for items that are lost or damaged in transit to or from our workshop. We take photographs of your jewellery upon arrival at and despatch from our workshop.
All prices are plus postage fees (Free for collection from The Engraving Van). We recommend that you chose fully insured postage options, such as Royal Mail Special Delivery.
Experience.
In addition to being experienced engravers, we are also qualified and experienced in Silversmithing, Goldsmithing and Jewellery Design and making. This means that we know how to take care of your precious jewellery when it is in our care.
Engraving Methods.
We are proud that we primarily engrave using a traditional method of (machine) engraving using a diamond tipped tool. The diamond tool is moved across the metal to remove some of the surface layers, leaving a clear, bright cut. For this reason, it is often praised as being one of the most durable types of machine engraving and is suitable for very fine, detailed engraving. This method has been used to personalise jewellery and other objects for decades.
More recently, this technique has been combined with contemporary digital technologies to make it easier and quicker to convert any style of font, design or image for the engraving process. Because the process is faster than Hand Engraving, it can offer a more affordable engraving option for customers.
For some styles of engraving on suitable objects, we also offer deep, milled engraving. This technique cuts away more of the surface of the metal to leave a deeper engraving. This particular style of engraving is not suitable for intricate or fine detail designs. Please ask us if you are interested in deep Mill Engraving.
For some objects, we still find it best to engrave on our manual engraving machine.
Customer Service.
We are a small workshop and take time to work with you personally to check your exact requirements and only engrave your jewellery once you have confirmed that you are happy with the proof (draft engraving) we send to you by email. Although our timescales are efficient, we do not rush turnaround of your engraving on an impersonal, factory production type basis. There is no middleman. You will be communicating with the engraver themselves to ensure there are no communication errors.
Cleaning, Polishing and Plating.
We offer a complimentary light surface clean and polish of your jewellery prior to engraving (optional and product specific). If your jewellery is deeply scratched, where relevant, we offer an optional re-finish and polish service at additional cost (product specific). For white gold jewellery, we can arrange for these to be re-plated at additional cost (product specific). Where these services are available, they will be offered as an additional option on the product page.
Sustainability.
We operate as sustainably and as environmentally friendly as possible within our workshop and are always open to considering new ideas to keep improving. See our sustainability ethics here.