The Making of a Master Engraver

by

Layne Zuelke: master jeweler, engraver, gunmaker, and occasional fiddle player

Layne Zuelke’s career as a master jeweler began almost thirty years ago when he was seventeen and needed a job. “My dad knew the O’Halloran family. I went to work in their jewelry store in Baton Rouge and fell in love,” Zuelke said. “I had worked with my hands my entire life. This was a natural fit.” Later Zuelke would continue fine-tuning his craft at Hannon Jewelers, where he studied the art of making handmade jewelry under Master Jeweler Bayardo Maltez of Nicaragua. This six-year apprenticeship led to Zuelke obtaining his Master Jeweler Certification.

Zuelke’s engraving career came about through necessity. About fifteen years ago, he began restoring antique jewelry, most of which is hand engraved. Zuelke had to teach himself how to engrave so he could complete customer orders. “At one time, hand engraving was common, but it doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. During this period he also took up watchmaking as a hobby, a practice that helped Zuelke hone the skills necessary to craft very small pieces of metal that had to work together with machine precision.

The marriage of all of these talents supports Zuelke’s latest endeavor—gunmaking. “It was like one-plus-one-makes-two,” said Zuelke. “I was a lifelong hunter. I thought if I could craft jewelry and make watches, I had the skills to make guns.”

His first project and biggest professional accomplishment to date was building a flintlock gun, a type of firearm introduced in the early seventeenth century, from scratch. His mentor for this new project was Shawn Webster—master quill worker, muzzleloader, and Red Jacket Firearms gunsmith (of Discovery Channel’s Sons of Guns reality TV show fame).

Zuelke’s hand-engraved guns caught the eye of Will Hayden, founder of Red Jacket Firearms and star of Sons of Guns. Hayden asked Zuelke to engrave some flintlock rifles for an upcoming project. This was the beginning of an ongoing partnership; Zuelke is now the in-house engraver for Red Jacket. On one episode of Sons of Guns, Red Jacket built a set of commemorative guns as a personal gift for the U.S. Olympic Shooting Team. Zuelke engraved all of the inlet medallions with each shooter’s initials.

Right now Zuelke is working on a set of three .45-caliber pistols for Red Jacket. Each one of these pistols will take about a month to complete. The engraving work is the final step in the process, with the design stage taking just as much time as the metalwork. “I spend as much time with a pencil and paper as I do engraving,” he said.

Red Jacket, Webster, and Zuelke have also joined forces to build guns for the reenactment community, supplying living history events—such as Hayden’s planned fully functional 1750s French Marine Post—with historically accurate weapons.

Zuelke also collaborates with other gunmakers. Recently, Bob Browner, a gunsmith out of St. Louis, asked Zuelke to help build a documentary copy of a dueling pistol owned by Andrew Jackson. The original is on display at The Hermitage Museum in Tennessee. Webster built the gun, and Zuelke engraved it. “Now we have a perfect copy of a historic gun,” said Zuelke. The two put the replica up for auction at the 2013 Contemporary Longrifle Association fundraising auction. When the hammer finally fell, the dueling pistol sold for a little more than $4,000.

Zuelke believes that hand engraving can turn a contemporary item into an instant heirloom. “Recently I finished engraving a small pistol for a lady who loved to garden,” he said. “I engraved some feminine flowers and bees on the side; I made an everyday gun special.”

Zuelke, who is his own boss, splits his time equally between jewelry-making and repair, gunsmithing, and engraving. “Best part is the freedom to pick and choose the jobs I want to do,” he explained. “I like to take on large projects, and they can be time consuming.”

Next year Zuelke has plans to submit his work to the Firearms Engravers Guild of America in hopes of obtaining Master Engraver status.

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