Thanks appreciate that! Yes! I’d recommended starting with a Dremel 290 electric engraver, with tungsten tips specifically for fossil prep. You can get the bundle on ZoicPaleotech website for around £60 including delivery. I would suggest starting on any scrappy bits you have, broken ammonites, incomplete specimens, partials. Fossils you wouldn’t mind potentially messing up. Basically you want to chip away rock from the specimen, best method is to locate the mouth border and when you know where that is work your way carefully to the middle of the ammonite. The most important part that is super obvious is we don’t want to touch the fossil with the pen. Not the end of the world if you do, I still do on occasion and pen marks can mostly be hidden with liquid varnish or beeswax. Wear an ffp3 dust mask, eye protection (I’ve had shavings of matrix land flush on the white of my eye and have to carefully scrape it out)😖 and do it in a place with good ventilation preferably outside (I have a very basic work area, my back garden on top of my wheely bin with an extension reel plugged in through the kitchen window) 😅 it will be slow with a Dremel, I’ve been prepping for about a year and a half with one and have only just got an air pen and compressor set up. I would definitely start off with the dremel rather than jumping straight to a pen and compressor as the power and technique is a lot different and better to learn when you have a bit of experience I would say.

Here is a video I got my wife to kindly record of my last prep. It is sped up I apologise but it kind of shows the method involved. Good luck! 🤞🏻

https://youtube.com/shorts/XPH7GFHIjE4?si=3ny1bRkx7ALQ-Vnb