More details please? Needed equipment to do this
I use a thing called ”Personalizer Plus” from Electro-Chem Etch. It's powered by 120V AC and outputs 0 to 20 volts and 72 watts. My earlier post I said 12V, I misremembered. Had it for a long time.
You put an absorbent pad (supplied with the tool) on the contact piece, dampen it with electrolyte and hold it on the stencil which is on the item you're marking. I tape the stencil in place. It takes a few seconds to make black mark and a minute or a minute and a half to make deep etch. The mark in the picture took one minute, lifting the pad away every 10 or 15 seconds to let steam escape.
I've had stencils made by Electro-Chem Etch and more recently by Lectroetch which is a few miles from my home and also run by a friend of mine. I have also made my own stencils which is a process in itself with it's own learning curve. Making the stencil will add, I don't know maybe a half hour or an hour to the job. There are instructions on line for making stencils for screen printing on such things as t-shirts. The process is the same. For me it depends on the job. A one-off mark for my own stuff, I'll make the stencil. For a job I'm getting paid for and have to mark multiple items I'll have the stencils made. I'd say to start, buy the stencils and then maybe learn to make your own if you want to. But if you're going to make just one mark it's kind of expensive to buy... options in a paragraph or two.
Both companies also have what they call die impression stencils which is material you impress your characters into with a typewriter, stamp dies or even a custom die but I've never used that process. I did get some of the die impression material but after looking at it, I didn't expect great results. Supposedly you can use a stylus or even a ball point pen on it to create the characters.
Both companies also supply electrolyte solutions and I guess the beauty of them is they are non-corrosive. As I said earlier, those various solutions are good at making a very sharp, black mark on the different materials and do OK for a shallow etch but the salt water I used on this one really gave me a good deep etch. It did also discolor the steel where it seeped through the stencil and ran down around the barrel but quick re-polish with 320 grit took care of it. Next time I'll not saturate the pad.
Now, there are people doing a very similar thing using salt solution and a 9 volt battery. Check on the u-tubes. I'm not sure this method will work very well with the stencils I'm using but they are using vinyl stencil made by a vinyl cutter hooked up to their computer. It cuts a design on a sheet of vinyl, then they pick out the parts they want to appear as a mark, leaving the rest, and use transfer tape to place the stencil on the metal. Labor intensive.
Here's the other option for stencils; if using the 9 volt battery method you might try vinyl stencils from website called dogfightink. I bought a stencil from him, it was 14 bucks delivered IIRC. It was for markings on an NFA item and it was kind of complex. While the stencil looked good, I didn't want to sit there with a magnifier and a dental pick removing all the letters, leaving the centers of o's, p's and such. Wasn't feeling patient that day. So those types of stencils may or may not work well with the method I use, I don't know. Might be worth a try. Also some people make stencils with a label maker (Brother is one brand) and a special label tape. Kind of looks to me like it might be good for a shallow black mark but maybe not a deep mark. I'd like to try but don't want to spend the bucks on a label maker only to find it's not suitable.
I hope that points you in the right direction!
