In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote:
On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 19:50:28 -0800, Lane wrote:
I work for a small shop that makes aircraft parts. What they are using for
part marking is a little hand held rubber stamp thing that holds a couple of
lines of individual letters and numbers. It is time consuming and tedious,
you have to use tweezers in set each character. There has got to be
something better.
When I was doing FAA/PMA manufacturing and design work, we had the stamps
also. We bought library-type stampers where the digits are on a band,
up and around, that you change to be whatever it needs to be. Worked
pretty well, and the FAA didn't have a problem with it.
We do quantities from 1 to a few dozen, but sometimes as many as 50, which
is rare. I found the hand stenciler that McMaster has on page 1752. Is this
a good set to use? Anyone have any other recommendations?
Talk to the folks you buy your stamp ink from, they should have a source.
http://www.aplusstamps.com/aplus-cart/date-stamps.php
shows kind of what I mean, but with a longer loop of numbers/letters
rather than a wheel. Clear as mud?
In the past, I've combined the parts of three outdated date
stamps (one band for month, one band for year, and two bands for
day-of-month) into a single six-digit stamp. You might try this with
*new* stamps if you can't find one locally with individual digits all
the way across.
And when I worked for a company named "Melpar", many years ago,
the best ink for marking components of mil-spec projects turned out to
be a production of another branch of the company. It was called
"Mel-ink", and was an epoxy which was mixed just before application, and
rolled onto a sheet of glass prior to transfer via the stamps. (You had
to wash the glass off before it cured, or toss the glass. :-)
A quick web search shows it to no longer be available under that
name, but it did find the following:
http://www.acemarking.com/inkinfo.htm
which includes some epoxy-based inks. They will also happily sell you
just about any kind of stamping tool as well.
There are probably others, but finding one was sufficient for my
purposes. Feel free to search on:
epoxy based inks
if you want to find more.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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