Whoever said that rosin will not work with steel was right.
I managed a couple of pieces but the results were inconsistent and unpredictable. I went back to plumber's flux:
A quick wash, do the machining right away and then wash thoroughly and neutralize with soda bic. No rusting.
Ignore the stamping, the horrible result is only partly due to my lack of skill. Who knew that a set of stamps for $11 would be useless?
Michael Koblic, Campbell River, BC
stamping stuff is surprisingly much harder than it looks.
You could try case hardening the ends. Of course then they wouldn't be $11 stamps anymore.
The main problem is that they are bent in all sorts of ways so it is impossible to line up the letters even using a jig, or strike them evenly because the plane of the letters is not 90 degrees to the shaft and this angle varies letter from letter.
I have not done much stamping up to now and thought I would try it seeing that it would cost me only $11 (my previous set was numbers only - that one had the number 4 different size to the rest!).
The main benefit of the exercise was learning what to look for if I want to do it seriously in future. However, nothing that I have seen of it so far convinces me that it is a useful technique for my purposes.
Michael Koblic, Campbell River, BC
About all I use the cheapies for is marking lead ingots as to what they were melted down from. They work OK for that. For marking anything else, you need a set of US-made stamps, uniform lengths, uniform widths, can be spaced evenly with shims so the results look decent instead of done by bubba. I wanted larger characters than the sets I had, so I got the cheapies for lead marking.
Stan
If you're using rosin-core solder, you're right, it's probably not going to work, particularly if you're using a torch. There are activated rosin soldering pastes that work well with steel parts, particularly when used with a properly tinned soldering copper. Would have to go with a 500 watt iron that maybe would do the job to replace a soldering copper for large work.
Stan
Where did you get the stamps? I have a few sets of Harbor Freight stamps that are better than that. They were pre "son", so maybe that is the difference.
Midland Tools in Courtney.
But even reputable dealers occasionally sell lemons. For instance Rio Grande have just discontinued a set of similar stamps which had uniformly one star reviews due to the fact that the sizes of letters in these sets were not uniform (i.e. 2mm and 3mm mixed up).
Michael Koblic, Campbell River, BC
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