CNC Laser Engraving Permanently Tool Identification
The nice thing about CNC laser engraving or color changing a tool for theft and identification purposes is that it’s PERMANENT.
We have a lot of tools that are worth quite a bit of money here at CNCROi.com so what I’m going to begin doing is branding them and showing you the results. Why buy expensive tools? Because we are a custom CNC shop, when we need something, it HAS to work.
Having tools with a very good resale value on the black market is always a risk, especially when you have employees where having something going “missing” can affect your bottom line rather quickly. One of the solutions to theft is permanent tool branding.
In this case, it’s a 400$ cordless drill, it’s an awesome drill that has heavy usage in the shop for a variety of purposes so let’s kill the resale value of it! By the way, we have a very large bed that can handle even industrial sized tooling for permanent engraving or branding, as a result, we can do many identical tools at once or very large ones, one at a time.
Have fun trying to scratch that off the tool, but we won’t stop there, we’ll use this drill to showcase what we can do across a variety of materials and surfaces using our Austrian wide-format CNC laser. This Bosch drill is really great and would take less than a minute to walk out the shop with, with a high resale value due to the quality of it. Killing the resale value more than pays for itself in this case as any thought of theft goes out the window.
The other advantage to CNC laser engraving or color changing tooling is that it doesn’t damage the tool as there is never any contact between the tool and our laser. Unlike a digital or vibratory peen, there are no vibrations using our contact-less tool identification method.
Again, have fun taking that off, in this case, the plastic was color changed. We did not introduce any paint or masking material, this is the plastic itself that’s been changed which means any attempt to remove this is very obvious to even the untrained eye.
The challenge with some clients is that they have a thousand different materials across a variety of materials, in that case, making a jig for each tool would be cost-prohibitive so much of the work is done by eye and using creative temporary set-ups.
Because we have a dual-sourced industrial laser, we can anneal and fiber mark stainless steel permanently. This come in handy because we can engrave wood through plastics and metal without introducing corrosive or material damaging third party engraving pastes.
If your shop has a lot of tools, keeping track of them may be a challenge when it comes to making re-ordering, so adding a unique identification number directly on the tool make getting supplies and knowing the history of any specific tool a breeze. For instance, we can introduce QR codes onto tools that can be scanned in or you can put your own alpha-numeric serialization system.
The color changing from our fiber laser tube on parts like a handle have no effect on the tool or the user. You really cannot feel the difference between something that’s been color changed vs not using our process.
The results vary depending on the material, plastics have different results depending on their material composition as you can see from the photos in this blog.
We are also able to laser engrave or color change batteries and other fragile accessories or tooling without damaging them, that’s because the heat is isolated onto the surface of the material and doesn’t travel through the tool.
For instance, this is a battery unit that would explode if we introduced the high-energy focused potential of our laser into it but by modifying our settings, we simply engrave into the surface causing zero damage. Not only that, the plastic again is permanently engraved, this is tough plastic, have fun trying to take that off using any tool out there!
The battery charger for our drill is made-up of two materials, one is a hard plastic and the other a label, using the exact same settings on the laser, you can see that we achieve different results as their chemical composition is different.
We can CNC laser engrave large or extremely fine micro-print. It all depends on what YOU want us to do on your tooling. Generally, tools are marked twice, once LARGE so everybody can see that it’s been permanently branded and a smaller one elsewhere like under a battery pack or on the cord leading to the tool for back-up identification purposes.
Looking for a company that has the experience, expertise and equipment to brand identification and tracking information on all your shop tools? Contact CNCROi.com today!
