Coolest Earrings for a HTML Girl [ Pic ]

Well, now that the storm has died down, I thought I'd comment for the sake of completion.We (my wife and I) are the people who make the earrings. I deeply regret not having designed the earrings so that they were easily mass produced, but they were concieved as an admittedly stupid joke that would sell at best a couple of pairs (which they did, before being Dug? Dugg? Digged? Whatever)The earrings are fabricated one at a time on my small benchtop CNC milling machine. I tape a sheet of sterling silver to the bed of the machine, load a diamond tipped engraving tool and do the text. Then I change to a 1/32" diameter end mill and cut the profile and make the hole for the ear wire. The edges are deburred by hand filing (milling silver makes an awful burr, due to the malleable nature of the metal), and earwires are put on. The process is relatively quick, about 15 minutes per pair, but as I was making 20 pairs on Friday I almost lost my mind. Part of this was the fact that I had just enough silver to make them at the time.The advantage of using the CNC milling machine is that I can prototype and produce a variety of earrings without investing the possibly wasted time invested in making stamps, a blanking die, etc. So it is rapid prototyping, but not mass production...had I known that they would get their 15 minutes (more like 24 hours) of internet fame I could have optomized production, but honestly now that they are no longer on the Digg front page, I expect sales to return to their normal one or two pairs a month level.It was a lovely surprise to sell so many pairs in a short time, and to get the traffic to our Etsy shop. Now that the story has moved off into the 7 days category, traffic has returned to normal levels. The comments provided us great entertainment, especially the negative ones!Anyway, just thought anyone who is still reading this comment thread would like to know.Nick

Closed Account Jun 4, 2007