For longer than a year, I have been considering the purchase of a hot foil stamping machine. I finally decided to stop searching and take the plunge. White Elephant has received excellent reviews, but I would have to import it from the UK (I am in the USA), making it a bit more expensive and troublesome to deal with than purchasing the Dream Factory machine. I will deal with it if the White Elephant is a considerably superior machine. I wonder if I can get input from this community before making this decision. Thank you so much! Laura
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Dear Cristian,
Thank you so much for the very helpful and thorough answer to my question. It is great to hear that you had the chance to try both machines. I am still evaluating both of these machines and Omac 993M, have you ever used this one or heard anything about it?
Also, would it be too much to ask for your opinion on manufactures of quality brass dies? Thank you so much for your help with this.
I have some friends with the DF press so I had the chance to try it out.
In contrast to ME, DF uses a leverege mechanism combined with a height adjustable column, so you adjust the imprinting pressure by adjusting the column's height rather than the manual force required. This is a good method whenever you have a series of identical pieces to deboss. There are 3 factors influencing any debossing process and they are the applied pressure, the temperature and the dwell time. So the DF press makes constant the pressure and temperature leaving the dwell time to your latitude meanwhile the ME press makes constant only the temperature leaving you room to master the other two.
I would say that for prototypes there is not a real difference in results between them, but if you want to maintain a consistent result to a series of identical pieces then DF is a better option I believe.
You should also consider the quality of the brass die which, I consider, is more important than the press itself. Maintaining details to a minimum and no lines under 0.2mm in width should create the prerequisites of a high quality hot foiling.
Hi Laura, I haven't used the Dream Factory machine unfortunately, so I can't comment on that. I do like the Metallic Elephant KSF mini, but I can't do a comparison.
The only thing that puts me off the DF machine is that it doubles as a press for die cutting. The amount of power needed to perform this task may reduce sensitivity and feedback needed during the foiling process. I'd prefer it to be designed to do one thing well rather than a compromise.
Saying that I could be completely wrong and it works fantastically for both purposes. Hopefully someone here has experience.
Edit: I don't know where I heard this but I thought ME had a dealer in the states. Might be worth asking them if you haven't already.