Cart
No products in the cart.
A custom made date stamp is a simple rubber stamp with rubber date bands of numbers and letters to create an adjustable date with text of your choosing. The date format for New Zealand is, for example; 26 JUN 2023. By rotating each of the 4 rubber bands with your fingers you can dial the number and letter sequence for the date required to mark on your paper or box.
There are different positions the customisable area come in. The small ones have a space above the date and also another one to the side of the date. Additional to these ones generally a custom made date stamp has space above and below the date and a little to each side of the date. Generally, the space either side of the date is limited.
The stamp body is mass produced in factories and sent to stamp makers like Self-Inking Stamps who make the customised part and mount it on the plate inside the body for you. There are many different bodies available. Just about all of them have the date in the middle. It is not moveable. Some have a double date for ‘from’ and ‘to’ dates.
And a couple of small ones have the custom area above or beside the date. Most stamp bodies are all plastic construction. However for high use situations there are also ones with steel frames. Much more robust and can handle hundreds of stampings per day. Also, the largest of the date stamps are on these steel frame bodies.
Anything is possible. Okay within reason, calm down this is still just a stamp. But having said that it is really open to what can be achieved. Text, images, lines, tick boxes, chart, grid, logos, signatures, yes all are possible.
There are the usual stamp design rules to achieve a clear, readable, repeatable quality mark from your stamp. Try and keep text above 6.5-point font size. Yes, smaller is possible but less reliable. And suffer from solid centres to hooped letters. Line thickness should be 0.2mm or thicker. Spacing between area of ink should be minimum 0.2mm or larger to stop ink bleed squelching in and filling that void area.
With the rules from above in mind then it is just a case of collating all the items you want to include in a stamp. Find the model of dater stamp that suits you in our website or email us with all that information. If there are images then send a vector file image preferably, or a pdf of that will load on the website, and lastly a 300dpi image if the vector is not available. Remember the saying ‘garbage in garbage out’. I hate making stamps of poor quality because of a poor-quality pixelated image supplied. Tell us about location around the date and how it needs to be. Does it need to fit in a particular sized area like filling in a form. We need a measurement for that or a scanned pdf of a document showing where it needs to fit. Is it going to be in a high use situation which a more robust stamp body will be required like a bank teller.
The date is generally the same size no matter what model you choose. There are a limited number of exceptions to that rule. But think 3.8mm tall and around 25mm wide for the date part.
For the date part no. As mentioned before these are mass produced in factories on the other side of the world. I would best describe the font as something like Arial Narrow or even Utah Condensed. However, in the customisable area any font is possible. The proviso is seen above for line thickness. And letter thickness is the same rules as above, no less than 0.2mm for any part of a letter. So, a font like Times New Roman can get too small for the line thickness on one side.
From there we use that information supplied and scale them to stamp size. Then it is a matter of selecting a body shape and size that will fit all those elements into. There is a lot of body shapes and sizes to choose from. Plus, we have access to three different brands of stamp. Currently on the Self-Inking stamps Ltd website there are around 60 to choose from. With years of experience designing stamps, we select the model most suited to your need without wasted space or unnecessary high price.
Selecting a body from the different shapes is about size firstly, then the layout of the image required and with that the shape of body becomes clear as to which one to use. We may even envisage a couple of design options and show you those. After all this is for you in your unique situation it has nothing to do with our preferences.
Date stamp bodies come in round, square and the most common is rectangle. We often put round images in a square body as the square bodies often cost a little less. Any shape can go in any body.
Along with different shapes and size is the choice between a self-inking stamp and a hand stamp with separate ink pad. Yes the old style hand stamp dater is also still available. These are handy situations. On the outside of a curved object like a jar. In a confined space these are smaller we have a client who used these to reach inside their product and mark circuit boards with a special ink.
Wow you would be surprised. There is a huge range of places. Usually, to save time is a reason for a stamp in the first place. Quickly marking when something is received is a real big reason. Take the example of a teller’s stamp in a bank. That stamp indicates quickly when information was received. Yes, there are even ones with an hour mark on them too.
The opposite of that is when something leaves. Equally important to track when that inevitable question is asked, “when did you send that to me?”. Dispatching truck loads or more commonly is courier parcels for the internet-based businesses like our one.
We are asked for these so often we have three specific stamps for this explicit purpose. Each one with a different ink to suit all the different surfaces these are required to mark in the food production business.
These are high use stamps and generally use a steel frame body type. Again due to frequency of request we developed a product with a few layout options and have this on our website using the Trodat 5440 Professional grade stamp body.
We have a few other designs which are common purposes and can have your individual custom part included in that design. Purposes like Paid, Scanned, Entered, Received are all possible with the date included.
There are even models with an adjustable date plus an adjustable phrase. Dial up the date and dial up ‘backordered’ then stamp. There are up to 12 different words to dial up and save you a lot of money by having just one stamp to do a lot of your date stamping required.
Date stamps range from a 19mm round and 24mm square plate size up to the largest at 116 x 70mm. A huge range there. All sorts of design possibilities abound. Grid lines with tick boxes. Logos, signature and other graphic designs can fit. Large amounts of text can fit in large models. Okay not a novel. We get asked for seriously large amounts of text to fit in a stamp. While we have many different graphic design tools, we can use to manipulate text we are not magicians.
The self-inking stamp has a base plate the rubber die is mounted on. That is the stated size of the model of stamp. The rubber dies when laser engraved has a shoulder. This is a taper from the face of the mark back down to the base area of rubber. It is a taper and is there to support the rubber. If you think about a 0.2mm piece of rubber sticking up in the air that is not very thick. It is easily distorted when banged into paper all the time. So, this taper is critical to the usual thing right on the edge and that is a border.
People hate wobbly lines; we hate wobble lines it means we haven’t designed and manufactured that part correctly. The difference we allow for that critical edge amount is 0.6mm. That means 0.6mm on every side so you need to double that to see the width and height variation. Easy to calculate that is 1.2mm less than the quoted stamp size. A 41 x 24mm stamp has a maximum marking area of 39.8 x 22.8mm. Also around the date is a void. This is to allow the bands to rotate around without hitting the plate. Plus, the mechanism that hold the bands is on either side of the bands.
Here we have a couple of things in play. Consider the above size difference of 1.2mm off the stamp base plate size. Plus, printing scale. Plus, screen image size.
DOT NOT measure the size on your screen when viewing our design proof sheet. A screen has absolutely nothing to do with stamp size. It is purely to view. It is not to scale. Your screen can be adjusted for zoom and number of pixels viewed. Just don’t do that please. Please read the first word at the top of the page of your proof sheet in red which say WARNING. Then read the rest just in case! Have you heard that one ‘if all else fails read the instructions’? We include that warning to help you understand what you are getting.
A pdf document is how we send you the proof of the stamp design. This is for you to check. Yep, I can’t spell very well and are usually working at speed. Often, I don’t even read the words. Just area and shape and can it fit. Adjust the font and position. Yep, it fits. Next. So, check all spelling. I copy and paste to get your spelling. If you spelt it wrong, we have not corrected it. We have been told don’t change that too often now and with modern business names and like being a bit abstract to give differentiation it is hard to know when something is wrong.
All pdf prints are at the correct size. Okay check that! More recently we have had people querying that. After printing out their proof again and getting out the callipers to check the size we got confused. How is our printout correct and theirs not? Turns out you must check your printer is set to print pdf documents at 100% of size otherwise it is incorrect. So, check everything. Spelling, size, placement is it correct. Would you like to change anything? That is possible.
A custom made date stamp is for you. Not us. We can move things around change sizes and fine tune until this is just perfect. Please respect our time and get as many changes as possible in one go. Also, every time there is a change it adds a working day to your delivery target time.
Get in contact with us and tell us your story and we can design and quote for this magnificent mark you will be making.
Just ask us. If we have not made one before we can make one just for you. We custom make rubber stamps all day long. Why not get one to save you time in repetitive work, help your workflow, and reduce errors.
Or stay up to date with our latest news and promotions on our Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google and Instagram pages.
They were so helpful, gave clear easy instruction which made ordering very quick & easy. All done with such speedy service. Highly recommended. Thank you.
Jenny Adams
Thanks to Antoinette for her wonderful, helpful and friendly assistance, and the designers for quickly producing and editing proof’s as requested. Great service and pricing. Delivery was superfast! 10/10 – thanks team!
Jasmine Milton
Thank you Antionette and Trent for going above and beyond on a last-minute project for me. Great people and great work!
Simone Ward
You might be interested in …
What is the cost to buy rubber stamps in 2023?
Heavy duty rubber stamps built to last and perform year after year!
Learn about what rubber stamps to buy for your new business…