Flat Tags

Metal tags fulfill many roles throughout numerous industries, with considerable demand for high-performance materials and quick delivery. These diminutive items are typically indispensable for identification purposes, and any failure or delay can cause widespread operational disruption. However, you can solve problems of supply and availability by producing custom tags with Metal Marker flat tags. Our company has been providing clients in industries like military, aerospace and energy with premium, American-made materials for a century. If you work in heavy industry, it’s likely your company is a natural partner with ours.

Identifying information on machinery and for individuals tends to consist of letters and numbers, and this makes them vulnerable to wear and tear. Paper and other means of writing such information can’t withstand the elements, and even poor-quality metal can wear away sooner than ideal. As such, it’s necessary to emboss, engrave or stamp this information on high-quality metal tags in many cases. Just a few examples of the areas where metal tags are indispensable are:

• Job tags
• Asset tags
• Valve tags (steam trap)
• Telephone pole tags
• Serial number tags
• Super elevation tags
• Inventory traceability
• Product identification

Heavy industry and other jobs where machinery, tools and people experience extreme circumstances are the typical customers for metal tags. The identifying information on equipment needs to be able to survive extreme heat, flight, heavy usage and even armed conflict in some cases. Just a few of the industries that need metal industrial tags are:

Aerospace

The aerospace industry utilizes metal industrial tags for various reasons, primarily to ensure safety, traceability, and compliance with regulatory standards. Metal identification tags help in tracing the origin and history of materials used in aerospace components. This is crucial for ensuring that materials meet the required specifications and standards, and it aids in quality control and accountability throughout the manufacturing process.

Automotive and transportation

Metal tags provide a means of identifying and tracking individual components or parts in the automotive industry. This is essential for quality control purposes, allowing manufacturers to monitor and manage the quality of each part and ensure that it meets the necessary standards and specifications.

Energy

The energy industry employs metal industrial tags for several reasons, and their use is integral to ensuring safety, traceability, and efficient operations. In the energy industry, various types of equipment, such as pipelines, valves, meters, and other infrastructure components, are made of metal. Identification tags are used to label and track each piece of equipment, facilitating easy identification, maintenance, and replacement.

Oil and gas

Metal industrial tags help in tracing the source and specifications of the materials used in oil and gas infrastructure. This is crucial for quality control, compliance with industry standards, and ensuring that the materials are suitable for the specific environment and conditions in which they are deployed.

Military

Industrial tags provide the military with a robust system for managing assets, maintaining equipment, ensuring accountability, and enhancing overall operational effectiveness. These tags enhance operational efficiency, safety, and accountability.

In high-stakes industries that rely on metal tags, you can’t leave equipment untracked and unaccounted for. Thorough, accurate bookkeeping and tracking is vital to keep the organization running smoothly. In many cases, these sorts of record-keeping are necessary to comply with stringent regulations.

If your metal tags fail in the field, you can encounter considerable challenges keeping track of inventory worth millions of dollars. However, ordering custom metal tags can come with many pitfalls, such as the risk of delay or incorrect production. If you don’t have the metal tags you need, it can delay production and operations considerably. As such, blank flat tags might be the answer you’re looking for. As long as you secure a supply of reliable blanks, it’s easy to build up in-house embossing capabilities that give you greater control over this delicate sector of your supply chain.

While many companies order custom tags from an outside producer, this is an unnecessary expense compared to operating your own embossing machines. This dependence on a third party can also compromise the reliability of your supply while reducing the agility of your operation. Any time it becomes necessary to change your tags, it’s necessary to communicate this to your supplier and deal with the lead times. It’s more economical, consistent, and practical to order flat metal tags in bulk and emboss them yourself.

The embossing process is fairly straightforward, as modern-day embossing machines streamline the process to the point of simplicity. By supplying blank metal tags to an auto-feed embossing machine, the machine will clearly and prominently mark the tags and stack them in a finished area.

Once the process finishes, you now have a durable, reliable form of metal identification. However, the tags need to be flat, have a suitable thickness and consist of the right materials for the embossing process to complete correctly. Anything but a well-made flat tag will likely produce all sorts of defects within the process. In the best-case scenario, the machine will simply spit out non-flat tags or a flat tag of poor-quality construction in a ruined state. However, it’s often the case that your expensive embossing machine itself can suffer damage from using substandard tags.

While in-house embossing eliminates many risks and inefficiencies of ordering tags from a third-party producer, this is the one major concern it brings to the table. You need to ensure the quality of your flat metal tags or you won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of embossing your own flat metal tags.

Embossing machines are a widely popular alternative to working with a third party thanks to the advantages they bring to the table. Without such machines, it typically wouldn’t be practical for an organization to mark its own tags, even with the benefits.

However, these machines facilitate rapid production of embossed metal tags with minimal labor input and expertise from the user. In particular, they typically use an auto-feed loading mechanism that streamlines the use process and dramatically increases output. All the user needs to do once the machine has the necessary settings is load the blank tags into a hopper, at which point the machine automatically pulls the tags in to run the process. It marks each tag one at a time, and you can use the machine to emboss sequential or variable identification information on successive tags.

The tag the machine uses needs to be flat and blank or else you run the risk of deformed tags and damage to the machine. A deformed tag might go undiscovered for a while, which will disrupt production when that tag becomes necessary to use. However, that’s the best-case scenario.

A tag that deforms or jams in the machine due to not being flat or having the wrong dimensions can bend, twist and break inside the machine, which can cause a variety of issues. With a suitable tag though, the process should consistently complete without issue. After the machine completes the embossing process, it feeds the finished tags out in a controlled, steady fashion. This keeps them in the correct order, preventing confusion and helping keep operations smooth and efficient.

The way an embossing machine operates is straightforward, reliable and consistent. Far and away, the most significant point of failure is the user’s choice of metal tags. Choosing high-quality tags is the single most important way to ensure your tag-marking processes will remain efficient and reliable.

Inconsistent or weak tags will, at best, throw off the rhythm of production and jam your machine. With flat tags of the right material and design, these occurrences will be rare or nonexistent, keeping production smooth and efficient. Furthermore, tags that jam or cause problems will typically experience deformation to the point of being unusable. Making the right choice with high-quality tags ensures you get your money’s worth by preventing material waste.

Besides production, you also have your embossing machine to consider. It needs to press the tags to produce the marking you’re looking for, and a tag that’s too thick or too weak can cause problems. Straining the equipment or breaking off and falling into the machinery can cause a variety of issues. A temporary jam is likely, but it’s also possible for these sorts of accidents to outright break your embossing machine and necessitate repairs or replacement.

Once you make the shift to in-house tag marking, your most important decision is to choose the right flat tags. Making the right choice looks like:

• Ordering tags of the shape to suit your embossing machine
• Choosing the right material for your purposes
• Request the proper thickness for embossing
• Select a manufacturer you can trust to deliver high-quality flat tags

With these priorities in mind, you need to research materials, companies and other specifics to ensure you have the knowledge to choose correctly.

There are three relatively common core types of material for embossed metal industrial tags. Aluminum, stainless steel, cold rolled steel and brass each have their own unique applications and performance that you should familiarize yourself with before choosing the type of tag you want to order.

While embossing is a popular way to mark tags, it’s not the only method. Engraving and stamping are also common, but these techniques each suit different types of tags. When you’re embossing a tag, it needs to be thinner than a tag suited for the other methods of marking. Since the material needs to be pressed, it has to be thin enough for the machine to work with without damaging itself. For the most part, metal tags for embossing machines should be within the range of .016” to .018” thick.

Without a suitable manufacturer, you’ll lose many of the benefits of in-house tag marking. Delays, poor quality and incorrect tag dimensions will all compromise your tag-marking operations. As such, you need to check that any manufacturer you might partner with will have the capability and expertise to meet your demand for flat metal tags. No matter your industry or the scale of your needs, you can rest assured of a job well done when you partner with Metal Marker Manufacturing.

There are many qualities that separate Metal Marker from the competition, such as our high standards of certification and expertise. We’re qualified to work in defense, aerospace, energy and other demanding, heavily regulated industries and have unmatched flat tag capabilities. It’s because we’ve worked in marked tags since 1923 and have been learning and growing along the way.

Metal Marker started in 1923 in North Ridgeville, Ohio. From the start, we’ve been producing excellent tags right here in America. We’ve never outsourced our facilities and never will, so you’ll always know you’re keeping your business in the states when you work with us. Furthermore, we’ve spent our century of service innovating and becoming even more skilled in our craft. We provide the absolute best in material quality, speed of service and adaptability.

At Metal Marker Manufacturing, we’ve innovated processes to take and complete orders in record time regardless of scale. We present consistently excellent quality and can provide the ideal marked or blank metal tags you need, whether as a small, one-time batch or a recurrent order. Our tags will always be the exact shape, size and material you require to meet your operational needs and thrive in a dynamic production environment. The Metal Marker team has worked with customers in just about every industry with demand for metal tags, so we’ll be familiar with your unique needs and challenges when you call.

Metal tags are a fairly niche industry, and there’s considerable nuance to how each customer’s metal tag needs are likely to vary. Military tags will have different requirements than plumbing tags, and plumbing tags are different from oil and gas, for example.

We know it’s not enough to simply understand metal tags themselves and have built a great deal of expertise in all the industries our customers typically operate from. Beyond that, we’ve impressed this knowledge upon our customer service representatives so that they’ll be equipped to help anyone who reaches out to us. No matter your industry, you’ll find a customer service representative who understands the nuances of your metal tag needs to an extent that may surprise you. If you know what you need, we’ll help you get started quickly. On the other hand, our people have the expertise necessary to help you figure out what you need if you’re still not sure.

Metal Marker has countless credentials and qualifications to our credit, with awards for material quality, management and business practices.

• ISO9001 + AS9100 Certified Quality Management system
• Registered with the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) in accordance with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)
• Award-winning quality and delivery in the Oil and Gas industry
• Accredited with the Better Business Bureau
• Made in the USA

Contact us either online or by phone to begin the process of ordering your needed metal industrial tags.

When you decide it’s time to bring tag marking in-house, you’ll need a suitable partner to source blank flat tags from. Trust a century of expertise and the Metal Marker Advantage when you’re in the market for metal tags and get in touch with us at 800-428-0095.