Using our Metal Stamps on Stainless Steel

After much testing and research, we have concluded Beaducation Original Metal Design Stamps work great on non-hardened stainless, especially the jewelry-grade stainless blanks that we now sell. Please read the following important information.

• We carry lots of brands. Our Beaducation Original brand stamps are rated to use on all soft metals and stainless steel (if you are a newbie, in this case "rated" means it's specifically rated yes/good/go for it). There is a filter when looking at the design stamp category under "material" called "Rated to Stamp on Stainless Steel". Click that filter to see all the stamps that are rated for stainless.
• Knives are hardened steel and none of our stamps should be used on knife blades.
• Just because a stamp "can" stamp in stainless, doesn't mean it will be easy. We do not recommend this metal for beginners. Stainless steel is very difficult to stamp on because it is such a hard metal. The larger and/or more intricate the design, the harder it will be to impress into stainless. Tape your blank to your bench block and consider using a 2 lb hammer.
• We highly recommend buying a few stainless steel blanks to use as practice pieces.

In the past, we did not advise customers to use our stamps on Stainless. The rule to keep our stamps off stainless came from years ago when we really couldn't tell what kind of stainless people were stamping on but often it was non-jewelry items that were too hard and could damage the stamps. Now that we carry blanks made mostly for jewelry intention and some pet tags (most often grade 304, 316 or 430) we decided to reevaluate and take a closer look and challenge our rule. After extensive research and testing of both our tools and stainless blanks (both in-house and sending them out to machine shops to be tested), the results are in....and we can say with total confidence that our stamps will hold up on non-hardened stainless. I (Lisa) have personally tested many of our Beaducation Original design stamps and letter sets and I've had a handful of customers test them as well (testing with 100+ impressions). We have found that they can impress into stainless steel quite well AND they hold up. For example, I stamped one of our script letters 700 times into a few of our stainless blanks (and on a spoon!). The stamp and its impression still look great. That being said, if you are wondering how long they will last if mainly being used in stainless, we really have no way of accurately answering that. There are so many factors involved (what exactly you are stamping, the amount of detail in the design, overall stamp size, what size hammer you use, etc.) but based on our testing, it will last a long time. :)