I think every company I have worked at they used color coding. Each end was painted that color. It was the easiest/cheapest way to do it. Number can fade or be read wrong.

Chris, CSWP
SolidWorks
ctophers home

Yes, we also painted the ends since that's generally what anyone sees first, the end of the stock in a rack. It's easy to sort by size, but for material, you need something that jumps at people, like color. Now we only dealt with four or five different materials, so it was easy.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

I'm coming at this from the mill side of things (so marking it before it gets to you), but we used a combination of print marking (along the length of the rod/bar, applied during manufacture), painting the rod/bar ends with 1-2 colors, and peen marking to imprint text onto the rod/bar ends. Which method was used depended on the customer requirement. For your application, painting the ends probably makes the most sense, and saving any sort of stamping to mark more specialized/critical stuff.

thank you all for your input what do you think is the best way to carry the P.O. # for the bar stock.
thanks again

Call the good folks at Brady.

https://www.bradyid.com/labels