ABS is a strong, lightweight copolymer of Acrylonitrile, Butadiene, and Styrene. ABS is manufactured in various grades—some are designed for molding; others for thermoforming or extrusion; and some grades are designed for electroplating, which provides that chrome-plated look popular in many plumbing and automotive applications.

This black ABS electrical connector exhibits a typical CO₂ mark—an engraved mark with slight contrast. To achieve this mark, our setup consists of a 10-watt Synrad laser, an FH Series marking head, and WinMark Pro laser marking software. The FH head is equipped with a 125 mm lens that provides a 180-micron (0.007”) focused spot with a 3 mm (0.118”) depth of focus.

In order to automate the date coding process, we creating a text object in WinMark, and set the Auto Text Type to Date Code Text. This step reads the current date from the marking computer and updates the text string prior to each mark. In this case, we assigned the European standard (DD.MM.YY) as the desired date format. Due to the size of the mark area, we set the date code’s Text Height to 2.0 mm (0.079”) and chose the wider profile of WinMark’s European stroke font to increase legibility.