I love the idea of restoring something to preserve its history like a lot here are doing with these pumps and related items. But sometimes you come across things that can't be saved. While this pump sat in my storage I would often just open the door and always look down at the date stamped on the inside. Now that i'm restoring it, it has bothered me that getting these blasted will remove those dates.

I got on Amazon and ordered some carving pads and thought heck this isn't that difficult to reproduce. Sat at the kitchen table and in about 2 hrs had a stamp made and wondering the whole time if i'm the only one that will get any kind of satisfaction out of all that trouble?

Great idea! I will have to check into this carving pad thing.

That's really slick Mark, good idea. I've been looking into these kind of things too in order to get a complete restoration. Bothers me sometimes when you lose the little details like this, I get what you mean. There are some slick stuff out there now. It's easy to make your own water slide decals at home using an ink jet, can get very small. For stamping, like you just did, I saw a stamp making machine, used by scrapbooking people mostly, but havent tried it yet. It's very cheap, I think like $40 for the system. Think it work really well for something like this and no carving needed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77dmNKcPoAE

Paul I've read up on these machines and while I am always looking for an excuse to buy a new gadget, don't think I would use it all that much. One other thing is you might be limited to the type of inks you can use. I actually thought about using automotive paint for mine since it's basically a "use it twice and done" kind of thing. But the ink that I bought with the rubber pads is permanent on metal and good enough for me. The carving tools came from my intermediate school days when we would carve things out of linoleum in art class. I still had my little tool set the teacher gave me to keep. Talk about a packrat.

Mark, like you there are many of us out there who enjoy working for hours on the details of a restoration. I have created vinyl lettering for a couple of projects by making stencils of the remains to retrace and cut out on new vinyl. I find it rewarding to recreate the look of an item as it was when it came from the factory. This is as close as I can make it to how it originally looked. The last photo is of a project in progress where I have created the new stencils to be used in cutting out the vinyl. The new vinyl lettering will be applied once the carrier has been repainted. It may be a bit obsessive but who cares as long as you are having fun while you are doing it and pleased with the results afterwards. Cheers, Don.