A shortcut taken early is a flaw that outlives the object.
Every piece moves through the same five stages. None of them are interesting to watch, which is roughly the point.
Brass arrives as flat sheet or round bar, leather as full hides, oak as rough-sawn board. Nothing arrives pre-formed. This costs time and is the only way to control what happens next.
Material is cut oversize, then brought to dimension. Brass is worked cold. Leather is cut with a knife against a rule rather than clicked out on a die, because a die makes every edge identical including the wrong ones.
Laser engraving, on a machine that is checked against a reference plate at the start of every session. Artwork is proofed at final scale before anything is cut, because engraving is subtractive and cannot be undone.
Filing, burnishing, and hand-sanding through grits. Brass leaves unlacquered. Oak is oiled, not varnished. Leather is burnished at the edge with water and friction rather than sealed with a coating.
Nothing is packed on the day it is finished. It sits overnight and is looked at once more in daylight, because a maker who has stared at an object for three hours is the worst possible judge of it.
On the machine in the room
We use a laser engraver. Some workshops are quiet about that. The reason we are not is that the tool is not the standard — the tolerance is. A hand-cut line and a laser-cut line are held to the same requirement: it must be right at the depth, right at the scale, and still right when the object has darkened around it in five years.
What the machine genuinely changes is repeatability across a run of commissioned pieces. Forty coins carrying the same mark should carry the same mark. That is a job a machine does honestly and a hand does not.
What we reject
Roughly one piece in twelve does not leave the bench. Most failures are engraving depth, a small number are finishing marks that only show in daylight, and occasionally a material fault that was invisible in the stock. Rejected pieces are not sold as seconds.