Section:

Hours: 8

I just attached the data plate. This was an interesting project. Several builders I know have had their plates engraved, but I thought the engraving was hard to read. I decided to use metal letter punches to mark my plate.

I tried manually holding the punches but did not get very good results. You really need to align the punch vertically before striking it so I built a guide to hold the punches using some aluminum angle pieces.

I clamped the data plate to another plate and clamped an alignment bar over it that. I was then able to slide my guide along the alignment bar to register the punch position vertically to make straight lines of text.

To control the horizontal spacing, I printed out labels that matched the spacing and size of the punches. I taped the labels above each data plate field and used that to guide where to place the punches.

Here is the result.

I attached the plate under the horizontal stab.