I was looking at cheap specialized machines that I could possibly buy for use over the summer as GF is here yet and I stumbled across this:
You may already know about it but if not, it is a stamp maker where you load a cartridge in that then gets heated in specific areas where your design is(sound familiar?) and then you join it to a stamp block and ink the negative space that you heated up in your design. Quite impressive for about £130, I haven’t looked into it but I’d expect the cartridges, special ink and blocks add up fast. But I wonder if the special heat activated stamp material or similar would work in a laser. (not carving the material just heating the surface)
Hope someone finds it useful, not sure I will be getting one(if I was flush with money I would!).
I don’t have one, but in the US the machine and inks are sort of inexpensive (like, $75-100 for a starter set) on amazon, but then those little refills are crazy expensive. A little bit cheaper on ebay, but $100+ for like 7 in various sizes.
You can make your own photopolymer stamps for a lot less than that. Just buy some Imagepak pouches of uncured photopolymer (like from here) for less than $3 apiece (they actually come from the UK so you could probably find them cheaper) and get an inexpensive nail curing UV light like this one. Make a negative by printing black on transparency (although you will get better quality by using photonegative process, supplies from the same source), sandwich it with your Imagepak and process in your nail light, wash out uncured resin, and voila! A brand new stamp.
Thanks for the share!