Park Marking Help

"Lane" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com... | 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. | | 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? | | Lane

I used to work briefly for a company called Imaje Ink Jet. French company, now part of Marsh(?) or something like that, but they do ink jet printing for commercial and industrial stuff, from the code on your soda pop to the part numbers printed on the tools you might buy, in all shapes and fonts. I watched the lab custom mark golf balls for some event. Very cool. They have a poster that shows a red headed little girl with a huge pink bubble gum bubble, and a sort of scared look on her face. Company log is printed ON the bubble. Not cheap, of course, but non-contact printing is the way to go when it comes to odd shaped parts. You can program the printer with the text or even custom characters, wave the part in front of the head (or vice versa,) and voila, its done. Very low maintenance and the ease of use is well worth the effort. They have US competitors, too.

I also know that a fine point ultrapermanent sharpie meets BAC requirements!

You can use one of those hand markers that have belts of numbers and characters in rows, with narrow wheels located between each belt of characters, which rotates it, lining up the proper sequence. I used them for years when stamping part numbers on items made for the aero-space and defense industry. You might check with any shop that makes hand stamps. They usually carry them. I used both methods and was much happier with the tool I speak of.

Harold

Forgot to add these:

Carl, thanks for the info, but it just isn't going to happen. We need a manual (read that as cheap, inexpensive) system.

Lane

Harold, now that is an idea worth considering. I'll take it to the boss and see what he says.

Thanks, Lane

One of our customers has a slightly better way to do it - they have an old-style miniature letterset printing press, sized for postcards or business cards. You get a tray of printers' type and set your text, justify it in the type frame and put it the press. Or if you know a print shop in the area with a Linotype you could have them hot-set all your part numbers on slugs for you.

Rather than printing on paper, the little press has a rubber blanket on the printing platen, along with an alignment ledge for the part. You cycle the press to ink the type, the platen closes and transfers the ink to the blanket. Then you line up and press the part to the blanket to transfer the ink and mark it.

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"Lane" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:

Try taking a look at , especially at .

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.

Talk to the folks you buy your stamp ink from, they should have a source.

Dave Hinz

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

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:

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.

Nope, can't be a label, rather has to be inked directly onto the part.

Good idea, will persue. Thanks Lane