Hi! Has any one ever printed on the “head” of a key before? Similar to the attached photo?
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Keys are usually brass or nickel plated. Since brass is a copper alloy, it has a higher chance of reflecting the laser, so you will want to use care. You will need to use a marking compound like Laser Bond, dry moly lube, or another and you will want to mask the key to make sure you don’t hit bare metal with the laser if the key is brass.
You will not be able to engrave it, only apply a surface marking. The GF doesn’t have enough power to engrave metals.
That looks like it’s engraved, which this laser won’t be able to do - but if you do a search for Dry Molly Lube you’ll find a bunch of posts on that, and other materials that’ll let you mark your key
It’s actually stamped; if you look at the edges of the letters you can see they are raised where the stamp pushed the material out of the letter. This looks like it was hand stamped. I have done a lot of this and you get pretty good at identifying it!
An example of the stamps:
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True. I was thinking “physically indented into the metal” as opposed to a surface mark, and yeah stamps are more likely than hand done.
The difference is that engraving removes the metal instead of pushing out of the way. Subtle difference.
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