Individual part traceability - ink/paint sprayer?

Hi all!

I work at a plastic injection molding facility for automotive, and we have talked off and on for months about how to improve our part traceability. Currently parts have the month/year of production on them (dots on a date wheel or chart) and better traceability only exists if they are still on the rack we shipped to the customer.

A former employee's pet project was attempting to use an ink/paint sprayer to spray the date & time on a part, an idea another employee had from his time at a bottling company. This almost works, but since there is generally a minute between our parts the sprayer gets clogged from the paint drying. And the problem is even worse if the press has been down for any reason. Since he retired after an injury a few months back, no one has had the time to take that project on.

Anyone out there use a similiar process at their plant successfully that can recommend inks or paints to try?

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, I wasn't sure where to post so I figured I'd try where I knew automotive folks would be looking.

A Quick Bump!

Can someone respond?

Thank you very much!!

Have you tried off the shelf stamps, with digits on roller belts?

These are commercially available for date strings, and probably other encoded data groups as well.

They're a minor pain to maintain and use, but nowhere near as much grief as spray.

Differing kinds of ink are available, depending on your material you are inking. It can also can be a challenge to keep ink pads maintained with the correct balance of ink and solvent, but again, when compared to spray...

Lastly, do you have an employee with nice handwriting?

An inkjet style printer would work if you must have ink. But I would highly recommend you seriously consider dot peen marking as the solution.

So far I don't believe we've tried any other solutions for a day-to-day traceability.

normzone: Our office people have good handwriting, not so much our floor workers. We've talked about stamps you speak of, but we had some outspoken individuals who wanted a different solution. We might end up back that way though!

Project Man: I'll look into those. Thanks!