I am looking for a company that will make a custum die (design at the end of steel rod), in a very small size to personalize the jewelry that I am designing and making. It would be stamped on a small flat piece of metal perhaps 3mm x 5mm. I have googled and googled and have not found what I am looking for. Any ideas?
Are there any blacksmiths in your area? They have a tradition of making what is called a touchmark to identify their work. They incise into a flat plate a design, usually involving their initials but whatever catches their fancy. Then a short piece of tool steel is heated to yellow and driven into the plate. The tool steel is hardened and dressed, then used to make their mark in a hot forging. Sounds about like what you want to do.
DD
I hate to say it, but look in the Yellow Pages for your competition. Find another custom jeweler and ask. DesertDog’s idea also has merit. Or Google “Renaissance outfitters” and the like. There are always a number of blacksmiths in those listings.
When I taught school, I tried very hard to find someone who would make something like an “instant” rubber stamp. I wanted to be able to create a stamp that I could use just for an evening or two of paper grading on a particular topic with particular common errors. I found that I could get a stamp that I could sort of type-set a little message into, but that was really time consuming. I envisioned something that would let me write out a quick note and convert that to a rubber stamp quickly. Maybe even re-use it. Never found it. Can’t find it on the internet, and still wonder if it’s an idea whose time just hasn’t come yet. If I could come up with the technology, maybe I could sell it. Any ideas? xo C.
iPrint.com, custom just about anything. Up to 3" by 1.5" in a plain wood-handled rubber stamp, customized with up to 4 lines of text or three and a graphic. Other configurations available.
And upon rereading your post, it seems you mean one that you could customize yourself, and recustomize as you see fit…hmm…I know I had one of these as a young kid, and it was exactly as you describe…I could literally set a few lines of rubber letters into the stamp and use it for a while.
Here is a site which seems to sell a sheet of letters (including duplicates and triplicates of commonly used ones), and also acrylic blocks and supplies to mount them with. Looks like you can get going for $35 + shipping.
Hit up a local machine shop, they should be able to fabricate something like that relatively easily.
http://www.pryormarking.com/products/punches/inspection.html
Ask and ye shall recieve!!!
Yup, but, of course, places like that tend to charge out the wazoo (I should know, I’m a poor, starving machinist [Really I am! The boss makes all the money and I get little better than minimum wage!]). Still, you might luck up and find one that’ll do the work cheap. (Especially, if they’re starving!)
I used to have to do something like this, and used one of those rubber stamp kits which contain a bunch of individual rubber letters which you thred onto a rod to create a line of text for your rubber stamp. (In fact, it’s probably still around my house somewhere.) But I don’t use it anymore.
The technology that seems to have replaced this is self-stick labels and computer printers.
Whenever I’ve had to do something like that lately, I’ve used sheets of self-sticking computer labels (they come in lots of different sizes, and can always be cut to fit also) and run off the text I wanted on the labels, and then stick them in the appropriate spot. You can even do graphics, too, depending on your printer.
Not quite the same, but close enough.
Well, if you wanted to lay out a whole bunch of money, you could get a Brother Stamp Maker and hook it up to your computer. http://www.brother.com.au/Products/StampCreator_default.asp?SubCategoryID=18
(I have used these at work, but I am not affiliated in any way with Brother and I have no clue how much they cost.)
Nope. The type-setting stamp takes a very long time to set up with those little rubber letters (I also had one as a child). I envision a sort of soft metal template that one could write on and then quickly convert, on the reverse side, to an ink-holding surface. I guess I’ll have to keep playing with the idea. Thanks, dopers, and thanks to the OP who got his thread hijacked. xo C.
One other possibility.
This is sonething we used about 20 years ago, when I worked in a shipping warehouse.
One part was a stamp pad handle attached to an inkpad about 2" x 3". (Looked rather like a rubber stamp handle attached to the back of a small ink pad.)
The second part was small paper notes, the same size as this pad. You wrote your text on these, then peeled off a waxy plastic part on the bottom, and put the other part onto the inkpad on the stamper handle.
Then you used this to stamp onto cartons. The ink would come thru on the part where you had written, but not on the rest of the area.
That might be just what you wanted. But there are some drawbacks:
- the first few times it doesn’t work right – takes a few stamps to get it going.
- ink often leaked out around the edges of the pad.
- the paper tended to move out of position eventually – then you had the text at an angle, and a black-ink area where there was no paper over the inkpad.
- Generally, it only lasted about 2-3 dozen impressions before it wor out – the paper got so soaked with ink that the writing wasn’t clear, or it got wrikled, or out of place. We typically went thru several of these for a big shipping order.
These weren’t serious, when you are stamping on the outside of cardboard shipping cartons. But I think it might be impractical for use on school papers, where you want your corrections to look neat.