Enhancing plastic manifolds with appropriate lettering and marking is crucial for usability and assembly clarity. This guide explores various customization techniques, including printing and engraving, to help you select the best option for your application. 

Like everything, though, printing can have some setbacks. Printing has good adherence, but is not entirely permanent. Aggressive wiping or chemicals can damage the lettering over the manifold's lifetime. Additionally, it may not stick on polyolefins. If you know for certain your product will contain this material, we advise seeking another marking option.

Printing has since replaced silk screening for plastic manifolds. While the process is similar to printing, silk screening often limits color options as each individual color needs to be applied separately — almost like a paint-by-numbers picture. Also, this process involves more manual operation, thus making it labor intensive, expensive, and not as exacting as printing. Because of this, most recognize silk screening as less precise from part to part. Also, lettering can smear during application and compromise its aesthetic integrity.

Designers often note laser marking good for line engraving. Similar to milling, laser marking can cut engravings into manifolds to the finest detail. We recommend this process for products that require a high volume at a reasonable price, but only for certain resins.

Some materials take better to laser marking over others because in some materials, lettering becomes hard to read. Materials such as PTFE (Teflon) or acrylic cannot have laser markings for that reason. The exception is where material burns create a contrasting color, which gives rise to another challenge. Laser marketing offers no real color choices, which could become a hindrance the more complex a manifold gets. Designers should keep this in mind as well when considering marking options.