Tip for Today #1: What Makes a Quality Sign?
- Quality of Materials
- Quality of Construction
- Evenly Illuminated
- Easily Serviceable
- Crating and Shipping
Hi, I’m Jim. I’m the Director of Manufacturing here at Cima. I’m gonna take a little bit of time, tell you a little bit about what makes a quality sign.
So, one thing that makes a quality sign is quality materials. We make sure when they arrive at our facility, they’re not damaged, scraped, dented. We make sure we have all our corners caulked, our pieces always fit together nice and clean. We sand out all our welds prior to painting. Our paint jobs come out nice and smooth. There’s no dirt in them.
Another thing that makes a quality sign is the lighting. The illumination has to be nice and even. You can’t have it too thin and have LEDs too close to the face, they’ll create hot spots. You don’t want ’em too far away or the LEDs too far apart, they’ll create dark spots.
We wanna make sure you can access the service points to a sign without seeing nuts, bolts, screws, obvious places where you would have to open it up. We want to minimize any kind of hardware on the faces or anywhere where you don’t want to see it.
A lot of signs you see that have a dark spot, that’s the power supply in the wrong place. You want to be able to get to it easily though. That’s the key point is getting to it easily so that you can service it, drop a new power supply in. In the case, you need to even swap it out.
We have to be able to ship it properly. It needs to be able to fit in a crate nicely. You don’t just throw it on a truck and hope for the best; We put in a nice quality crate.