Most of mine are by JHS MODELMARK and are pretty good.

It helps to use something like GHT's UPT jig which would allow a faulty stamp to be rotated about its axis.

That said, I am sure that folk with plenty of practice can achieve good results by hand and eye.

I got these Kennedy stamps from Zoro. Very pleased with them.

https://www.zoro.co.uk/shop/hand-tools/letter-and-number-stamps/hand-stamps-sets/f/13378?query=letter+stamps

Ian

Edited By Ian Couchman on 27/02/2022 15:26:00

Arnold Throp was a senior man at Pryor in Sheffield. His stamping ground so to speak.

This is the type you need for accuracy, but you will probably need to make a holder :- **LINK**

When I made a special cross slide dial for the Smart & Brown imperial lathe so that a metric leadscrew could be used, (118 divisions is close to 3mm pitch), a jig was made to help hold the punches square to the dial when stamping it. Because I can never hold them straight freehand.

Faced with that problem on my Hemingway Kits T&C Grinder table, I elected not to make the little jig suggested but to use one my old, "widows and orphans " , Vee-blocks as a guide, and obtained satisfactory results. It just needed a lot of care to align the tools at each graduation.

However, stamping widely-spaced pairs of digits is not the same as stamping longer numbers or words, where engraving would be the far better method. (I do of course mean machine-engraving, not freehand with a vibrating-stylus tool.).

If the part you're stamping is flat and you can hold it in your milling vice, preferably some way below the top of the jaws, there's really no need for a jig at all in order to stamp strings of characters uniformly; you just need to use a threaded vice stop with some means of counting the number of turns of the screw (e.g. a hex head!) as you advance it for the next letter. You can even do multiple lines of text this way with just a bit of thought.

If you work with care, the only thing under these circumstances that will produce unevenly spaced stamping is if any of the characters aren't cut perfectly centrally on the shank of the punch.

My experience of six different brands of stamp tells me that buying even the most respected brand doesn't guarantee all the characters in the set will be centrally cut on the punch. Accordingly, in order to ensure you get evenly spaced and uniform stamping you need to be prepared to compensate for this manufacturing inaccuracy where necessary.

I've not tried characters on moveable-type-like bodies of the kind in Nick Hughes' link, so I couldn't say whether these are consistently cut more accurately than the punches; I'd hope so given the extra cost of them. And of course, as Nick suggests, you can't strike these directly with a hammer; they have to go in some kind of typeholder, made either for individual characters or for strings of them.

If you're using the latter kind of typeholder and you're marking a longish word on steel all in one hit you're going to have to be prepared to hit that typeholder very hard in order to get a good impression, particularly if you're using a biggish font size.

Great hint Derek

Think I have to make one of these jigs…

The ARC Euro ones in the top pic look like proper good 'uns. They have a nice crisp sharp line at the apex of each letter form. That means you don't have to hammer the hell out of them to make a good letter. A clear, light impression from a light tap will make a good looking result. Many of the cheaper ones are a more rounded profile so are not as crisp in the result they give.