At the banker
How a letter gets cut, from the drawing to the last stroke
People are surprised how little of this is carving. Six stages, and the chisel only appears at the fourth. The first three are where the letter is actually decided.
It is drawn full size, twice
Once to find the spacing and once to commit to it. Lettering is spaced by eye against the area between the strokes, not the distance between them, and no rule has ever been written that beats redrawing it until it stops looking wrong.
The stone gets a say
Bedding, colour and any vein are read before the layout is fixed. A vein through the middle of a word is not a flaw to be avoided at all costs — sometimes it is what makes the stone worth cutting — but it has to be chosen rather than discovered.
The drawing goes on in pencil, not transfer
Traced letters are always slightly dead, because tracing skips the bit where your hand argues with the shape. Drawing them straight onto the stone takes an afternoon longer and is the difference people notice without being able to say why.
The chisel goes in at the centre of the stroke
Cut from the middle of each stroke outward to the serif, so any error runs into stone you have not committed to yet. Cutting the other way means every mistake is at the end, where it shows most and is hardest to correct.
The V-cut does the work of any paint
The letter is a trench with two faces, and it reads because one face catches light while the other holds shadow. Change the angle by five degrees and the same letter reads heavier at noon and vanishes at dusk. This is why cut letters are legible after four centuries and painted ones are not.
Nothing is smoothed afterwards
The tool marks stay. Rubbing a cut letter smooth softens the arris, and the arris is the edge the whole thing depends on. A letter that looks slightly rough in the hand is the one that will still be sharp on the wall in two hundred years.
What it comes down to
The carving takes about a day a line. Everything before it takes three. That ratio has not changed since we started and it is the honest answer to why hand lettering costs what it does.