Price and Delivery:
Precision Hot Stamp has made a sizable investment in procuring the necessary tools to delivery our hot stamp tools when or before you need them.  By isolating the steps in the manufacturing process and developing ways to make them more efficient, we concentrated on the image manipulation phase.  The typical production process involves getting a film in house, then scanning the film to capture the image before engraving the stepped images onto the cylinder.  More and more engraving shops are using digital files to replace the scanning process. If they are not, you risk the chance of receiving dies with skewed images.  This is due to the difficulty in getting the film placed squarely on the scanner flatbed.  Depending on the thickness of the acetate and the performance of your rastor  processing equipment, this is little better than guesswork when beginning the "clean-up" stage of the job.  The next step is to clean the image before reducing it and stepping it properly for the CNC machine.  If your engraver uses a scanned image, the necessary time to clean the corners and smooth the circles can be extensive.  Most shops charge $50.00 and up an hour for "Clean-up" time.  As the illustrations below show, even a digital image needs clean-up time.   Precision Hot Stamp has totally removed this step, and the mistakes, the time, and the charges that goes with it!  We rely on a Windows NT computer, with 1GB RAM, dedicated only to file conversion.  And last year we worked with some leading CAD/CAM programmers to create a proprietary conversion software package that effectively does the clean-up for us. (Our engraver spent 16 years as a computer consultant before entering the Hot Stamp business)  Below are samples of what conversion software does. When you send us an email with a digital file, we can have that job running in a matter of hours.  And our prices reflect it!  Why spend extra for "clean-up" time, and risk the inherent mistakes that accompany this process if you don't have to?  At Precision Hot Stamp the saying amply fits:  "What you see is what you get"

E-Mailed EPS image before running through conversion software
requiring $50.00 an hour "Clean-up"

E-Mailed EPS image after running through conversion software

This EPS file would take over 6 hours for "clean-up" time.  It took the conversion program just 15 minutes!  This job was run on a 66 tooth cylinder for $1480.00