Taboo or Totally You! Engraving your equipment!?

photomoof said:
That is actually quite beautiful, but I would not dare without expert advice.

Sheldon Cooper: Why do you have the Chinese character for soup tattooed on your right buttock?
Penny: It's not 'soup', it's 'courage'.
Sheldon Cooper: No it isn't. But I suppose it does take courage to demonstrate that kind of commitment to soup.
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Excellent! Just what I was thinking! So many people get tattoos thinking they know what it means when in actuallity..
 
Jamie Pillers said:
I had my X-Pro1 engraved with the Japanese kanji symbols for Wabi Sabi, a philosophical idea regarding beauty in simplicity.

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that's one very cool looking camera!
beautiful looking engraving, leatherette and strap, beautifully presented too.
 
A few years ago I bought a very battered Pentax MX in Hue, central Vietnam. There was very rough engraving on it's base that I was not able to decipher, but being curious I took a macro photo of it and finally was able to make out a name and 'Acampo, California'. I made a google search and found a professional photographer with that name. He has a site on the net and in his resume it says that he published in travel magazines and books and one had been on Vietnamese cuisine.
So I contacted him, sent hi a photo of the camera and right, it had belonged to him! He wrote me that this MX had been a Christmas gift of his parents in 1979 and that the photos of Africa and Nicaragua seen on his site had been taken with it. The surprising part was that he never had taken it to Vietnam but given it to charity back in northern California some 10 years earlier..
 
kuuan said:
A few years ago I bought a very battered Pentax MX in Hue, central Vietnam. There was very rough engraving on it's base that I was not able to decipher, but being curious I took a macro photo of it and finally was able to make out a name and 'Acampo, California'. I made a google search and found a professional photographer with that name. He has a site on the net and in his resume it says that he published in travel magazines and books and one had been on Vietnamese cuisine.
So I contacted him, sent hi a photo of the camera and right, it had belonged to him! He wrote me that this MX had been a Christmas gift of his parents in 1979 and that the photos of Africa and Nicaragua seen on his site had been taken with it. The surprising part was that he never had taken it to Vietnam but given it to charity back in northern California some 10 years earlier..
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I always love finding out the history of things like watches, cameras, guns and other durable mechanical items. I recently bought a 1994 Toyota pickup truck and did a VIN search. Turns out that the original owner had lived all over the US and always serviced the truck at Toyota dealers; there was a very detailed record in the Toyota database; no personal info, just locations and dates of service. The truck was clearly well-loved and taken care of. Neat stuff.
 
I bought a WWII pilot's uniform at an auction a couple months ago. They man's name was inked in the color, so I could learn all about him. But I was really surprised when I took his Pilot's wings off to see if they were original WWII. Yes, they were, and had his initials engraved in the back of them!
 
B-9 said:
As a carpenter and a avid tinkerer, I and many of my fellow laborer's love to engrave, sharpie, and sticker our tools and equipment with initials and sometimes profanity.

Of course, this makes it easy to sort out who's is who's at the end of a job.

You also tend to see a lot of older cameras with social security or drivers license numbers engraved into their baseplates.

Most of the examples I've seen are sloppy and crude, as if carved in the trenches of the dmv with their key fob.

I've also seen handful of really nicely done engravings on cameras meant a for gifts or commemorating an event or date.

So what I'm asking,

Does anyone really do this to their equipment anymore? I can see why you wouldn't (resale value being obvious)

But at the same time, if it's yours, and you plan to keep it around, it might be fun to scribble some stuff and fill it with paint.

Has anyone customized their gear with an engraving?

Let's hear your thoughts, taboo or totally you!
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think of it like this

If you are not HCB or equivalent,
your wife or family will be cussing you out once they find out the
lower value of your customized engraved cameras.
 
I had two of my cameras done by a professional engraver back in the early seventies. Why did I have it done, same reason as X-Ray. To make sure I would never be tempted to sell them. And you know, it's worked, I still have the pair of M4's bought in the late sixties.

Part of the fun of this thread was using the same camera 4 decades later.
http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=147234

I also engrave all my high quality tools, but for a different reason. If any get lent to a friend it's easier to identify and have them return to my toolbox.

Glenn
 
In 1980 while at Ft. Bragg NC I had my Leica M3 engraved "LT Anthony Oresteen" by the advance lever. Like a fool I sold it around 1989 in Chicago. I would love to get it back :) If anyone has seen it please let me know!

I also had my wife's OM-1 engraved with her name on it. We still have it.

In the 70's the Army wanted everyone to engrave their personal items with their SSN. The supply SGT had engravers you could check out. The local police wanted it done as well to help recover stolen property. Heck, our duffel bags were stenciled with our full SSN on them.
 
I bought a rangefinder once that had some strange, brass plate with a symbol attached to the front of the camera. I kept thinking it looked familiar , but just couldn't figure out where I'd seen it before.

Going down the aisles of a grocery store one day, I spied it. It was the logo for Kikoman Soy Sauce.

PF
 
Haha, I love Kikoman Soy Sauce!

When I started this thread, I actually had no intentions of engraving any of my cameras with a social or drivers # lets just clarify that ;)

What I was thinking,

I bought a nice Dremel 290 engraver at the Goodwill store for 2.99$,

for some reason or another,

It got me thinking about doing designs on the baseplates of one or two of my worn cameras...

Haven't yet to put tip to touch... But I've got pencil all over

But maybe I should practice a little on something else first!

Keep the comments coming! Thanks for all the chatter!
 
The few cameras that I have purchased as new, I plan on wearing out, so the thought of resale is moot. But the bulk of my cameras I have purchased used, they were previously owned by someone else and I fully expect some day they will be owned by someone else again. I am just the temporary caretaker of them. Therefore I don't feel right about engraving my initials or anything else on them. I just use and enjoy them for now.
 
I have a threshold on my resale tendencies,

What it takes to stay,

A.) Was it cheap/broken? If I can get something for nothing and doctor it up, my investment is small and resale is moot.
B.) Special feels, when you get a camera at any cost and its just fun to look at and hold, let alone use. Some things you just get attached to, like goofy old Brownie Starmites.

I like to add a bit of me in there somewhere, so I guess the idea doesn't seem so oddball from my perspective, maybe in the same league as a colorful leatherette swap.

Amen to wearing these cameras down, if we don't who will.
 
Nicly engraved names on Leica M4

Nicly engraved names on Leica M4

About 18 months ago I bought this BP M4 from eBay, I got it for what I considered a good deal for a BP Leica. Actually, it sat on eBay for months, so I contacted the dealer (Camera West) directly and made them a cash offer. It was discounted because of the engraving shown here.

Kirk Thompson is a member of this forum, I contacted him after I bought the camera. He told me a friend of his, a calligrapher, engraved his name on the back.

For me, the engraving didn't take away from the value of the camera as a tool. I really wanted a black paint M4 (that's a whole other story) and the price was attractive.

I remember all of the newspaper photographers at the Topeka Capitol Journal used to label their cameras with Dymo tape on the back. I was a teenaged, wanna-be so I did the same.

I guess I haven't changed.

 
B-9 said:
Most of the examples I've seen are sloppy and crude, as if carved in the trenches of the dmv with their key fob.
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Lots of years ago, I bought a 135/2.8 like that for almost nothing. Someone had crudely scratched his/her zip-code in the aluminum barrel; looked awful. Even considering the low price, I couldn't stand looking at it; worse, it was so distracting that I couldn't even take pictures with that lens, and so sanded the barrel down and spray painted it semi gloss black again.. That's when the images started to come out great..

Long story short: engraving is awful, unless it's done really, really well, like the X-Pro-1 of Jamie..
 
I like to think of a good camera as something that's just passing through my hands, that someone else will use someday, so I'm reluctant to permanently personalize one. That said:

Jamie Pillers said:
I had my X-Pro1 engraved with the Japanese kanji symbols for Wabi Sabi, a philosophical idea regarding beauty in simplicity.
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I like that, and I am down with wabi-sabi for sure. I'm more interested in the covering you've put on there, though—never thought of re-covering a Fuji. It looks great.
 
x-ray said:
My MP is an ALaCarte black chrome that I had Leica engrave my signature on the back of the top. I have absolutely no intentions of ever selling it. As to engraving a SS# or other myself, why would you want to. There's already a serial number to identify it. I've never understood why people do that.
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So, I presume you have, at your fingertips, a log of the serial number of every serialized item you own so you can report the serial number to NCIC if it's stolen? No? I don't either.

Through the 1970s and 1980s stereos, TVs, car stereos and cameras were expensive and weren't considered quite so disposable. A camera, for example, may have been a once in a lifetime purchase rather than buying a new one once a year. Expensive consumer goods were stolen with impunity and recovered regularly. Law enforcement and crime prevention specialists advocated engraving your driver's license number on items as a way to identify the piece, and improve the odds of its return should it be recovered. In those days, it actually worked well. A lot of stolen goods were returned to their owners that way; but the bulk of the serialized items were sold at auction because the owners were never located.

Today, of course, consumer electronics are ubiquitous, cheap, and have little or no street value used, so the practice of engraving DL numbers has fallen out of favor.
 
I once bought, at a tremendous discount, a chrome M4, that had the previous owner's name engraved on the back just under the advance lever. The camera was in mint condition. Without the engraving, it would have cost substantially more. I bought it to use it. Unfortunately it was stolen, along with a lot of other belongings when my apartment was broken into. If I was the original owner, I probably would not go through the trouble.
 
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