The hand crafted emblem

An experimental process

Many of our customers have discovered that we have been in the lead, if not the sole player, in the business of constructing hand crafted reproduction car emblems.   We have been developing this process since 1989.  We have upgraded and improved our processes in many ways since the early days, so that producing a single emblem takes  more time than it did then.

For the past several years we have been falling further and further behind, causing our backlog to grow beyond a year. Because of this, we have been concentrating our efforts on fulfilling orders as fast as possible.

Handmade vs. factory made

The best emblems are factory made.  They are made with better plastics and have better aging characteristics.  We are also remanufacturing a select few emblems on our price list using factory methods.  It is much more expensive for us, and a certain level of demand is required, but the result is a much cheaper emblem unit price for you with higher quality.  Ask about our short production run emblems!

Why is there so long a wait?

Many people are shocked with our long turn around time on emblems that are not in stock. That is very understandable and we truly apologize. There are a couple of reasons for this situation. 

First of all, it does take a long time to make an emblem from scratch by hand.  There is a certain amount of cure time that need to be observed, and hand painting, that can be very painstaking and tedious. Additionally, the emblems require a vacuum metalizing process which is not done on the premises, but must be shipped to another factory.  So even in a situation where only one emblem was on our schedule, the turn around time would probably be nearly a month.

Scheduling

Secondly, In order to operate more efficiently, we group all of the plastic emblem jobs onto a schedule.  In the beginning our schedules would have just a handful of emblems that we would turn around in about a month's time.  But we also handle the cloisonné or enamel emblems too. They are on a schedule as well.   This schedule is alternated with the plastic emblem schedule.  This in effect doubles the amount of time that one must wait if their emblem will be on the next schedule. 

The longer customers have to wait for an order to be turned around, the more additional customers have to be scheduled on the next schedule.  The larger that schedule grows, the longer it takes to complete.

At this point the schedules have stabilized. We know that we need to improve our turn around time, and we are working toward that end.