Lumley Designs specialise in a range of British made bespoke elegant cast iron letter boxes, through the wall, wall mounted, free standing, railing letter boxes, surface mounted letter plates and top loading letterboxes in various styles, sizes and colour’s to suit both external and internal locations. Our mailboxes are designed to match the look of your home with decorative, contemporary, Victorian, and wrought iron styles with color choices such as bronze, verde, white, and classic black. We also offer brick mailbox replacement doors, brass numbers, and newspaper boxes. 100% satisfaction guarantee. 11020 Saint-Pierre (AO). Officina Tour Strada Sarmasse, 11-13.
I’ve wanted to do this for a while, more or less just to try it out to see how difficult it would be and how well it would work. I’ll confess that I have always been attracted to this type of thing – rubber stamps, branding irons and other ways to “print” the same pattern over and over. I have had really good luck with the toner transfer method, but thought this would be an interesting project.
I made a short video on making and testing the branding iron:
The first decision was how big to make the letter, and I was limited by a couple of factors: first, the overall length of the iron couldn’t be too long, or I would have to add support (steel softens slightly when heated) and find a different way to heat it other than a propane torch. Second, the smallest drill I wanted to work with in steel this thick was 1/16″, so the holes in the letters would have to be roughly that diameter or bigger.
I settled on the bigger size on this sheet and made two prints, just in case I messed up the first transfer:
The raw material was the wrench from my old table saw. I used this because it is the right thickness and the steel is of better quality than regular mild steel:
The paint has to be sanded off so that the transfer will be more visible.
The first try went well. A little spotty, but I can definitely work with this:
After cutting the end off, I used a hacksaw to cut shallow grooves between the letters.
A triangular file is used to make a start for the hacksaw. It takes a while to make all of these cuts and I need to make sure they don’t go too deep:
The excess is cut from the top and bottom using the grinder with a zipcut blade.
Some rough shaping with the grinder to remove the bulk of the material at the tops of the letters and grind down the areas between the spaced letters:
Large Wrought Iron Letters
Then a lot of file work to further shape the teeth.
I used an auxiliary chuck in my drill press, since the stock one won’t hold a 1/16″ bit:
The holes were carefully centre punched and drilled. I could then use the drill bit to ream out the holes longer to turn them into slots, and this is best seen in the video:
When I was satisfied that the letters were good, I welded it onto a piece of 3/8″ threaded rod that had a handle attached. After it cooled I used a file to smooth the face of the letters.
Trying it with pine:
And in maple. Works well, but there’s a heat range where it works best. Too hot and it will burn too deeply, and too cold and it won’t be deep enough. A matter of practise, I guess, or an infrared thermometer to find the ideal temperature through trial and error.
I didn’t realize until after that I didn’t make the “i’s”
lower case (they look like the “L”), but that’s easy to fix by cutting a groove across near the top.
Black Wrought Iron Letters
Definitely an interesting project and it didn’t take very long to make. Of course, there is a lot of hand work and a more complex pattern would take longer. This type of thing might be better suited to a small CNC machine that’s capable of cutting steel.