Input Needed

[Fred Ball]

Presently doing Laser Engraving and Sublimation but considering adding Hot Foil Printing. Trying to determine if the investment will pay off. Does anyone have any input on what or how you can make money with this machine or which machine would you recommend. Thanks for any input.

[Mark Sipes]

I would add pad printing before I would even think of foil stamping unless you want to get into the ribbon business?? I guess you could do pencils and match book covers. How big of a press are you thinking about...... pneumatic? or small hand press. Not good for single press items .. takes way to long to arrange typeset and heat press. Unless I am way off base here? Wedding invites, Business cards, napkins.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oBuv4tqQU8Q

[Rodne Gold]

I considered it at one time , getting metal dies made is a problem as it meant going out house. We could do them in silicon but the dies don't last and cos silicon "squashes" when pressed , you can have an issue with detail I have the idea up. What made and still makes us quite good money is actually manufacturing the silicon dies with our laser for others. Unless you into large scale foiling , like printing etc , I think its pretty much a tu'penny ha'penny business if you do diaries , wedding invites and the like... more trouble than its worth...
We are re investigating it on to flat substrates , as I think I have found a way to get foils to stick to colour laser transferred toners (CLTT) ..still have to mess with this , but don't have the time right now.

[John Salitsky]

I did hot stamping at a place I used to work. It was an ancient hand machine but it was fairly easy to set up and oce you got going you could bang out quite a few an hour. Like Rodne mentioned though, the dies had to be made by an outside source and of course you have to purchase the foils outside. You could actually make the dies with a mechanical engraver and chunk of metal although I don't know how long that would take. I don't recall what the ones we used were made of, maybe magnesium. We did mostly plastic name badges with it and some vinyl and leather items, luggage tags etc... I looked into it for the current place about two years ago and it was fairly cheap to get started with a hand machine. The requests I have gotten for it were mostly for vinyl padfolios and things like that.

This is the place I contacted with my questions. http://www.aamstamp.com/Default.aspx?tabid=203

[Mike Null]

I have three old machines--2 in good condition but I do very little with them. I am home based and most of my calls are for bibles or small binders. Nuisance stuff so I turn them down. I will probably sell two of the machines and use one for personal branding of name tags, etc. I consider them one of my poorer investments in equipment.

[Joe Hillmann]

At a place I used to work we had a bunch of hot stampers. The machines that I worked on were all computer controlled, all the operator did was load the part and hit a button. The stamper then did the rest. The only common issue we ever had with those machines was the hot stamp foil being being loaded incorrectly and then not leaving a full stamp. Although when I worked there they were making 4 or 5 thousand parts a day 7 days a week going on 5 years. I see that as a great use for hot stamping. One set up and run many many parts.

On a much smaller scale I guess it depends if you can create the demand for thousands of a part with the same stamp on it rather than just a few. I would assume that for real small numbers of items the cost per item would be so high due to the cost of creating the stamp and the time it takes to set up that very few customers would be interested.

Also what items can you hot foil stamp on to?

Of course if you think you have a demand or market for hot stamping then it may be a great tool for you and not for others.

[Liesl Dexheimer]

We do hotstamping but it can be a pain in the butt. I don't look forward to it especially on small runs. We usually hotstamp logos onto plastic name tags. I can see where sublimation would be a wayyyy better option. Luckily we don't do this very often.

[Fred Ball]

Thanks for all your input, as always the wealth of information is endless here and I appreciate it very much. I was considering the pneumatic machine from Aamstamp but judging from your response it is probably more of a pain in the you know what... Lasering and Sublimation is doing well and I was looking for some other service to add to our business. Well, I guess I'll keep looking! :)

[Joe Hillmann]

Mark had suggested getting into pad printing.

I built a pad printing machine that I cut out on the laser, the only thing I had to buy was the Cliches, a cup and a pad. When I built it I did it with the intention of using it to do smaller runs of part marking. But after I had it all up and working I realized it was so difficult to clean up the ink afterwords that I didn't want to deal with it any more.

If you or anyone is interested in trying pad printing without spending $1200 to get into let me know. I will see if I can find the files to cut out a pad printer.

[Rodne Gold]

If you have the budget , a small print and cut machine would be an excellent addition , especially this one as it prints silver (so you can print any colour metallic on dark vinyl etc) , there are a LOT of uses for it.
http://www.rolanddga.com/products/printcut/bn/

[Bill Cunningham]

I had a hot stamping machine of one type or another for 25 years. some of the more lucrative products that were hotstamped, have gone out of fashion. i.e. business cards, matches. used to do a lot of vinyl binders, but the newer ones do not contain PVC, and the foils have a hard time sticking to them. I used to foil print logos on name badges, but the logo quality can be much better and sharper using reverse engraved plastic and colour filling. I am now down to one machine, a hand operated KwikPrint I picked up 10 years ago at a fleamarket for 200.00
Used to make all my dies from hard polymer. They would last for about 1000 imprints in a single run. But, if the phone rang and you went to answer it and didn't pull the die, it would overheat and break. Rarely use the thing anymore..
260904

[Joe Hillmann]

Bill, what is required for the foil to stick to? And how did you make your dies?

[Albert Nix]

I have thought about hot stamping also. About the only request I get are for stamping Bibles and there is a book store close by that does it free if you buy from them and will do it for five buck if you walk in with it so I have opted out so far.