What is Hot Foil Lettering?

Foil Lettering is just like traditional foil stamping, but it's done one letter a time. With traditional foil stamping, the die is typically quite large - perhaps several inches wide. Flesher Foil Lettering machines on the other hand use a print-wheel with as many as several hundred smaller dies - one for each letter or glyph to be stamped. A typical print-wheel is very similar to a daisy wheel, or a ball head used on an old IBM Selectric typewriter, except much larger. And on a Flesher print-wheel, each individual die can be replaced, making each each print-wheel highly configurable.
A basic print-wheel will accommodate 80 characters - a complete Latin font (type-face) with upper- and lower-case letters, numerals, various diacritics and punctuation. To expand the useful character set, macros are often used to assemble a single glyph using more than one die on the print-wheel. For example, a period (full stop) character can be used to put a diaeresis above vowels when stamping German text. That same period can be combined with a comma to create a semicolon. With a larger print-wheel body, as many as 200 characters can be mounted, allowing several fonts to be stamped on the same piece.
Flesher Lettering systems are a marriage of old and new technologies. At the heart of one of our machines is the same technology that has been used to foil stamp on books for hundreds of years. But Flesher machines are controlled by our proprietary motion control systems, similar to a CNC milling machine. Modern information systems, like a web-enabled customer interface can be used to immediately transfer data to the machine. The operator then loads the product, and stamps it with a click of a mouse. In a real-world production setting, products can be personalized with a customer's name at a rate of about five per minute. A complicated thesis cover might take more than a minute to stamp. Compare this to hand-set foil stamping which can take almost an hour for a single piece. Below you'll find a few of the advantages and disavantages of our equipment when compared with other methods.
Advantages:
1. Highest production rates for jobs with variable data when compared to any other method.
2. Zero setup time on recurring jobs.
3. Very low setup time when stamping new jobs.
4. Data-entry errors can be completely eliminated.
5. Variable data can be entered by the operator as needed immediately before stamping for quick rework.
6. Very low labor cost compared to any other method. 
7. No recurring costs for dies.
Disadvantages:
1. Can't accommodate large dies.
2. Higher capital cost.