Sheet 03 · The work
Nothing leaves this building to be done somewhere else. That is slower and it is dearer, and it is the only way we know of being certain that what is on the sheet is what we actually found.
Key to the sheet
Lines run off the Orkney with a Humminbird sounder and a hand lead where the water is too thin for it, tied to two shore marks and reduced to chart datum. Inland work is levelled on foot. Then six weeks at the board: pencil at 1:12,500, ink over the top, and a field book that gets checked twice.
from £2,400
Sixteen-gauge copper, polished and grounded here. Coastline and contours are cut with the burin; sand, mud and hill-shading are bitten as aquatint. A coastal sheet runs 90 to 140 hours; anything with the moor on it, nearer 300.
from £4,800
Lettering and margin notes go on the Vandercook in Monotype Bell and Gill Sans; the plate itself goes through the rolling press, damp, at about four tonnes. Two to four inks, registered by eye against the corner marks.
£38 per sheet
Dry cleaning, washing, deacidification with calcium hydroxide, Japanese tissue repair and Irish linen backing. We work on sheets from about 1750 onward. We will not redraw detail that has gone — a gap stays a gap, and we write what we did on the back.
from £180
The rack
PL. 07
Copperplate, two inks. Surveyed 2023, corrected after the March 2025 dredge.
18 of 60 left · £145
PL. 12
Line engraving, three inks. Contoured at 20m, walked and levelled in 2024.
31 of 45 left · £145
PL. 19
Copperplate with aquatint ground. Tidal streams printed on the verso.
4 of 40 left · £165
PL. 22
In progress. Plate cut, first proofs pulled, edition opens in the spring.
Ed. 50 · list open
Three ways in
Open sheet
£38
An unnumbered pull from a plate still in the rack. Same ink, same paper, no edition number.
Editioned print
£145
Numbered, signed and entered in the edition book. When the edition closes, that is the end of it.
Full commission
from £7,200
Your water, your ground. Survey, plate and edition, start to finish. Six a year, no more.
The traverse
STN 01 · wks 1–3
On the water or on the ground. Lines run, marks tied, notebook filled. We tell you at the end of this whether the sheet is worth cutting.
STN 02 · wks 4–10
Pencil, then ink, at twice final size. You see it at pencil stage and again at ink, and changes are free until the copper is grounded.
STN 03 · mth 3–9
Burin work, then the bite. There is no undo on copper — which is why we spend so long at station two, and why you sign the ink drawing off.
STN 04 · mth 10–11
Proof, correct, proof again, then edition. Numbered as they come off. You get the working proofs, marked up where we changed our minds.
Asked often
No, and please do not. Our sheets are surveyed honestly but they are not UKHO-certified and they are not corrected by Notices to Mariners. They are accurate records of a particular fortnight. Carry a proper chart and hang ours in the saloon.
Because a copper plate wears. By the fiftieth pull the finest lines are already softening, and by the eightieth the difference is visible next to a first pull. Rather than sell people a worse print at the same price, we stop.
For survey work, rarely — the value of what we do is that Ivor already knows the ground. For engraving from your own survey data, gladly, anywhere. We have cut plates from data supplied for Strangford Lough and the Sound of Jura.
Commissions are running about eight months out. Sheets from the rack go in the post inside a week. Restoration depends entirely on what has happened to the thing — send a photograph and we will tell you within a day or two.
Next
A grid reference and a rough idea of what you want on the sheet is enough to start. We will come back with an honest view of whether it is worth cutting.