Substrate question

[Bradley Signs]

Yooo..... wait a minute. I thought this was the yank & the brit guy ??

Right mate! This is he, the Brits bloke.

Hey now, don't go roping MDO into the same category! We all know MDO with a nice thick coat of lead paint still looks 90% as good as it did when you could still get lead in your paint.


Ayup, and one panel of fire resistant building grade acm is pushing $300, and you'll need to order 100 to even get 1. Ironically enough, gas station canopies are not considered occupiable structures, so they can be built with the super flammable versions of ACM, even though they are already covering flammable substances. Though I've never seen a gas station fire that wasn't going to melt the canopy anyway...

One thing I haven't seen mentioned here, as far as ultimate painted surface, is porcelainization. If you can find someone who still does it, they coat whatever materials in a layer of colored porcelain. Our tower letters have a coating of this, and when we recently pulled them down to rework the neon, the only 'bad' spots were where the neon shorted out and burned some porcelain off.

Ayup mi duck!

 

[Scotchbrite]

My ACM prices keep going up, but aluminum has gone down. It this keeps up ACM will lose it's only advantage for me.

 

[Gino]

Yikes..... what thickness ??

 

[Scotchbrite]

What's a single 4x8 costing ya these days? I'm still working through a pallet I got at $47/each.

I won't use the .12mm aluminum "lite" versions of the ACM. 3mm with .15mm aluminum is running about $63/sheet.

 

[Gino]

Onesies and twosies is $55 a sheet. Get 10 and ya receive a small discount. I stopped stocking the sh!t and other things and use the distributors as my warehouse. I don't want money sitting on my shelves.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

.2 skin at glantz is $64 I think and maxmetal with .15 around $54 if you buy a few sheets. I like the bebond better even though it costs a little more

 

[Notarealsignguy]

This could be in my head but the thin skin seems to bend easier when handling it and dents more from the hold down in my shear. It feels chinsy too, the .2 bebond is noticeably heavier than the maxmetal with the .15 skins. The one time I got cheap single sided crap for some throw away signs it curled up like a wet noodle and was useless so I never did it again.

 

[Gino]

Bebond from glantz is their economy and cheap stuff..... or it used to be, unless they renamed it. When it's too thin, it doesn't work well on our flatbed. Too flimsy. We like .012. Even .008 will work, but why chance it ??

As for Laminators..... they're right down the road from me, so getting stuff from there is no problem, but about 3 or 4 years ago, I got some stuff in from them and it was single-sided stock. Both sides were masked with their logo masking. I took off the masking and on the back side in very small lettering stamped on the back was all the information from where it came from........ frickin' china !!! I called my distributor and he looked into it and said all he could figure was, the stuff is made in china, sent over here and Laminators puts their masking on it. Yep, that's how they get away saying it was made in America.... it was MASKED..... in America. F*ckin' b@st@rds.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

At the least I went for two sided crap, only problem is I have to strip twice as much film.

We ship most of our signs so we only strip 1 side. I've had a few customers comment that they don't like how the back of our signs look.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Kinda like the led sticks we buy. Fully assembled in GA, after the chips are made, and installed into modules in china.

We do work for an LED lighting manufacturer. They told me that there are no domestic producers of LED chips. China does the smart work and we do the dumb work, kind of a shame.
Gino, bebond might be their low end but I'd guarantee that all of the ACM comes from 1 or 2 manufacturers in China and is just labeled differently.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

I think that people make a lot of excuses about why we produce things in China. China may have been an unregulated disaster 20-30 years ago but so was the USA back during the industrial revolution. Neither is today. The main reason things are made there are dollar bills. No company here wants to invest the amount needed to produce many of these items on a scale that is competitive. It's too much of a gamble especially when there is more money and little risk in simply buying chinese goods and retailing them. The only downfall is being at their mercy which has not been an issue until recently. The chinese government finances these large manufacturers, you can not compete with that, they can lose all the money that they want in order to buy a market.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I remember watching some documentary about factories in China. It was about a Chinese company that opened a manufacturing plant on Ohio and about the struggles... mainly because of the workforce. The Chinese factory workers produce 100 times better than the typical blue collar worker you find in the USA. It showed Americans as being fat, slow and dumb about learning tasks and having an entitled attitude. Think of the kind of workers you find that are one step above fast food and that's they type of people they have to work in the factories here.

From what I've read, China is making big headway into environmental problems and adopting EV cars.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

I remember watching some documentary about factories in China. It was about a Chinese company that opened a manufacturing plant on Ohio and about the struggles... mainly because of the workforce. The Chinese factory workers produce 100 times better than the typical blue collar worker you find in the USA. It showed Americans as being fat, slow and dumb about learning tasks and having an entitled attitude. Think of the kind of workers you find that are one step above fast food and that's they type of people they have to work in the factories here.

From what I've read, China is making big headway into environmental problems and adopting EV cars.

I think you told me to watch that? I have a customer that used to be high up at Honda. They moved the plant from Ohio to Alabama to save money and he said it was a total disaster because the workers were virtually useless there.

 

[Billct2]

I thought is was about a Japanese company making cars

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

American factory