OEM Metal Fabrication — Where Your Mark Goes on Stainless

A gas hob sitting in a stainless deck with a two-tier rack of labelled spice jars behind it, a spice grinder on the deck and cabinet doors below. — A hob, a rack behind it and the clearance between them. On an OEM job the internals are where the brief is either followed or quietly substituted for something cheaper.

01Where a mark survives

Ranked by how long the mark lasts in real use, not by how good it looks in a photograph.

Placement options
Placement	Survives	Seen by	Note
Underside of the top	The life of the part	Installer, service engineer	The default. Never cleaned, never abraded
Rear face of an upstand	The life of the part	Nobody, once installed	Good for traceability, bad for branding
Front face, laser marked	Years, fades slowly	Everyone	Marking sits in the surface; a heavy re-grain removes it
Front face, etched and filled	Years	Everyone	Contrast survives; the fill can wear in a scrubbed area
On the top surface	Weeks	Everyone	Do not. It is a working surface

The pattern is simple: the visible places wear, and the invisible places last. Most OEM buyers end up doing both — a discreet front mark for the client and a permanent underside mark for traceability.

02Three marking methods

Laser marking, chemical etching and stamping behave differently on 304 and 316L, and differently again on a brushed finish.

Laser marking anneals the surface. No material is removed, nothing is added, and the mark is a colour change in the passive layer. It is permanent against cleaning but it can be polished out.
Chemical etching removes a shallow layer and can be filled with ink for contrast. It leaves a small step that holds dirt, which matters on a food-contact surface.
Stamping deforms the plate. On 5 mm and above it is legible and permanent; on thin sheet it shows through the other side, and on a finished face it is a dent with a logo in it.

Mark after graining, not before

If the part is grained after marking, the mark is grained too. Sequence matters, and it is the first thing to agree on the drawing.

03What to put on the drawing

Fig. 1 — Where the handover happens. You own design, brand and market; we own plate, cutting, welding, inspection and packing. The drawing is the only place the two meet.

Four things, and a sample if you have one:

Artwork as vector (SVG, AI, DXF) at final size — a raster logo will be traced, and tracing loses the corners.
Position with dimensions from the same datum as everything else, not “centred on the front”.
Method — laser, etch, stamp — chosen, not left to us.
Size limits: minimum stroke width is around 0.3 mm for laser and 0.5 mm for etch at readable contrast; below that it becomes a grey smear.

Send a sample of a mark you already like, even a competitor's. It is faster than describing contrast in an email.

The marking is the last operation, not the first. We cut the plate, machine the edge to ±0.05 mm, weld anything that needs welding, grain the surface, mark it, then inspect and pack. That order is fixed because graining after marking erases the mark, and packing before inspection hides a defect. On a private-label run the grade and thickness are yours to choose — 304 or 316L, 5 to 10 mm — but the sequence is ours, and it is the same sequence for one set as for a hundred.

04What we will not do

We will not mark a brand we cannot verify you are entitled to use, we will not copy a competitor's product label onto a part, and we will not put a mark on a working surface where it will fail in the first month — even if that is what the drawing says. We will say why, and offer the alternative.

Everything else is a normal line item on the quote: marking is priced per part, per method, and it appears next to the plate cost so you can see what the branding adds.

Custom countertops · Send artwork with the drawing · Order terms