Re: SPY 007 XM-L2 ENGRAVED
Oh I see.. it was a fantastic light.. May I know what would be the price of such a custom piece? It looks badass!!!
The cost of a SPY stays stable with price increases every year or so as necessary but the engraved lights are out of my control in several ways. One, I have to risk an expensive set of parts through the mail both ways to the artist. I have to wait many months to see what comes back; and quite frankly it is quite a variation. During the engraving work, a few of the lights have been scratched and dulled. In those cases, I have stone washed the entire light while masking off the engraving. That is very time consuming and problematic too.
I do not sell many of them on the forum because they need to be seen in person to be appreciated. I put several up here a few weeks ago and at first everybody just window shopped. I realized they were not able to see in the pictures if the work was up to their standards. So I tried posting videos and that helped tremendously.
Some of the engraving takes 5 times the work as others, just depends on how the artist is feeling the design I guess. So I simply look at the final product and try to judge what it is worth. The range of the engraved lights I have done so far, has been up to $4000 for a single piece of work. I have asked for gold and copper inlay but they have not seen fit to do such work for me yet. I am not sure why because I told them to knock one out to the park and then lets just see what happens with it. We all have seen knives with mega engraving that sold in the 5 digits.
After looking at the Lothlórien for a few months and comparing how good the scull and dragon scales came out once stone washed, I decided to pull it and stone wash it. It came out fantastic, even better than I had imagined. This time I did NOT mask off the engraving and instead let it run for almost two days. It rounded the engraving so that it now has a more 3D look and it bleached out all the dark texturing behind the foliage if you will. That made the pattern blend into the look and style of the silvery 007. I will try to get a video of it posted soon.
So there you have it, each piece is individual and judged not only by what went into it but how good the final art is. If you are interested in an engraved SPY please send me an email and we can start from there.
Cheers
Dave