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Craftmaster sign enamels

Hand Lettering topics: Sign Making, Design, Fabrication, Letterheads, Sign Books.

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Hedley
Posts: 31
Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:47 pm
Location: Northern Ireland
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Craftmaster sign enamels

Post by Hedley »

Hi
Haven't been on as while but was wondering who has experience using the craftmaster sign range that Handover are now stocking . Any pros and cons and comparisons to one shot would be appreciated.
Thanx
Hedley
HEDLEY

www.freewebs.com/hedleysflutebandart
www.freewebs.com/hmba2

Look the Part - Marching Band Art
Doug Bernhardt
Posts: 1077
Joined: Fri Apr 09, 2004 9:29 am
Location: Ottawa Canada
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Re: Craftmaster sign enamels

Post by Doug Bernhardt »

This is such a great topic to introduce and I hope it goes deep. That someone is producing (or even trying) a quality product for our industry gives me hope.

There has been guilds and standards organizations for artists colours and paints for many years. If you buy a tube of watercolour or oil paint today you'll see a PY number for (or the ingredients themselves) on the label. These standards were set up a century or so ago to provide a standard which every artist (amateur or professional) could rely on to predict the permanence of their material or at the least use as a guide to use when combining different paints. For instance they would never use a paint with a copper ingredient without providing a varnish in between it and cadmiums. Not to get too involved in the chemistry but the word craftsmanship is important here. That a 300 yr old painting by Rembrandt is still around attests to this.

I had my shop for 35 or 40 years and in all that time we counted on 1 shot to be a reliable material. This is no longer true. We can blame it on the lack of lead in the paint and the environmental issues but in truth there is still paint produced for professional use that contains lead and therefore some of these excuses just don't cut it. As an industry we are responsible. Whenever there were visitors (other sign folks usually) in my shop one of the questions was "how much do I pay for 1 shot?" The truth was I really cared less....I cared about the quality (I believed in at the time) and was just the expense of doing business.

Now I believe we should be using the strength of numbers to insist on a product that will stand up to the weather and perform. This could have been one of the mandates of the Letterheads Movement much as it was by the artists of last century. With them (as with us) it seems the failing culture of craftsmanship is to blame.

Just as I was closing my place up a year or so ago I had an old client and someone I had completed and good solid design and a painted gold leaf wood sign for call to ask for some touch ups. I'll try and dig up a photo but the long a short of it was that I had used 3 reds to do an interesting blend with, the centre colour which was 1shot bright red had faded to zero. It looked like the Canadian Flag with 2 bars of red on the outside and what had been "bright red" on the centre all but completely disappeared. I don't mean faded...it was just plain gone.I don't believe this is acceptable. When these failures occur who is holding the bag? When you open a new can of paint that dries 12hrs slower than the last one (and lets face it....you know what you're doing) and they only say a couple of months later that " Oh...we made a couple of changes" who is holding that bag?

I don't know about everyone else but I had a backyard full of tests. This colour with such and such a clear coats and so forth. I wouldn't dream of selling a client something I didn't believe would perform. These types of arbitrary changes without forwarding and testing within our business environment is again unacceptable and frankly made it impossible for me to keep any integrity. Making excuses for poor craftsmanship wasn't/isn't in me
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