Engineering specifications
Material matrix, source selection and MIL-STD-130, AS9132 and NASA-STD-6002 in full.
Marine and heavy engineering
Mark it once, trace it for decades
Your works order issues the serial. It gets marked into the part itself, not a tag or a label, and it still reads after blast, paint and years at sea.
- No tag to rivet on, no label to fall off, no paint pen gone after the first blast.
- Graded before and after your own blast and coating, so readable is a measured grade, not a guess.
- Big castings and welded-in sections get marked where they sit, no crane lift needed.
Why the old marks fail
None of these choices are careless. Each one was never built for salt water, load and decades in service.
- A riveted tag corrodes at the fastener first, and in salt water that fastener is the weak point.
- A paint pen number is gone after the first blast and clean, before the part is even coated.
- A hand stamp gets ground off in fettling, or buried under primer, topcoat and antifouling.
- A label rarely survives one season on deck hardware or an exposed hull component.
What the mark has to survive
Which process applies is picked against your material, and what happens to the part next.
| Process | What it does | What it survives |
|---|---|---|
| Annealed, on stainless | Oxide colour change, no material removed | Blast and cleaning; the passivation layer stays intact |
| Etched, on steel and iron | Shallow depth, real contrast | A garnet blast that strips paint pen and shallow marks |
| Green source, on bronze | Marks where infrared reflects off | Fettling through to dispatch, without losing the pour number |
| Cast-in, at the pattern | Raised characters, no per-part cost | Everything; it carries the pattern number, not a unique serial |
When the identity gets assigned
Position decides more than the process does. Four places the mark actually happens.
- Step 1
In the machine, mid-cut
A marking head added into a cutter or CNC cell marks the part while it is still held in the fixture.
- Step 2
At the bench station
Fittings, small castings and batched parts that reach a bench get marked there, no crane involved.
- Step 3
On the stand
A counterbalanced arm brings the head to a casting too heavy to lift twice, and sets standoff for the face.
- Step 4
Welded into the assembly
A handheld rig marks a section already tacked into a frame, or a part still on the hook.
Your materials, row by row
Steel, stainless, aluminium and bronze take the mark differently, and each meets a different process next.
| Material | How it marks | What it has to survive |
|---|---|---|
| Carbon steel and weldments | Etched or engraved, good contrast | Blasting, galvanising and years under primer and topcoat |
| Coated and painted steel | Marked before the coat goes on | An intact coat exposes bare metal at the mark, so the coat is planned around it |
| Stainless | Annealed, no material removed | Keeps the passive layer intact, so the mark stays a mark, not a corrosion site |
| Bronze and copper alloys | Green source, where infrared reflects off | Fettling and a pour through to dispatch |
| Near a weld | Placed clear of the heat affected zone | Weld heat and stress relief, agreed away from weld toes and fillet radii |
The engineering detail
For the engineer, the quality manager and supplier approval.
Stress on fatigue and pressure parts
A mark that removes material is a surface discontinuity. Under cyclic load or pressure, a discontinuity in the wrong place can start a crack. An annealed mark removes nothing, which is why it is specified on fatigue sensitive parts. Depth and location are signed by your design engineer, per part family.
Marking before or after coating
An intact coat absorbs the beam, so a mark on a coated part forms in the coating and lasts as long as the coat does. For blasted and painted work, the mark goes into the parent material first, at a depth chosen to still grade after the blast.
Standards this is checked against
Data Matrix is generated to ISO/IEC 16022 and graded against ISO/IEC 15415, A at 4.0 to F at 0.0. Where a customer or class society flows down MIL-STD-130, AS9132 or NASA-STD-6002, the mark is specified to and verified against it. Certification of your parts stays with the body that owns it.
What the mark opens
Material certification, the heat or cast number, weld records, NDT reports and coating records, all reachable through one identifier. The item most shops have not scoped is evidence of the marking process itself: approved depth, sign-off and the measured grade.
Marking a part that stays put
A counterbalanced arm carries the head to a casting on a stand or a housing under the crane hook. A handheld rig goes further, into a defined laser safe area, for a repair or a part already welded in place. Both are designed and built in Nelson.
Connecting to your job system
The serial, job number and drawing revision come from the system that already holds them. That might be NetSuite, Infor M3, Dynamics 365, SAP, or an in-house job system. The station reads it outbound over TLS, and never invents a serial.
For the rest of the committee
This gets decided by more people than were in the yard.
Start here
Integration architecture
Connection patterns, failure behaviour and network posture, for IT.
Programme assurance
The named document set, the acceptance gates and supplier prequalification.
Send us a part
Post one or two components in the alloy and surface condition they arrive in, with the drawing and the coating spec. Tell us who is asking for traceability: a class society, an OEM customer or your own warranty team. You get back a numbered report, with the parameter set, the verification grade and the process window.
Last updated August 21, 2026