How Our Signs Are Made
Every product on this site says 8x12 rust-resistant aluminum. This page is what that means, and why we make nothing else.
The substrate: .040 aluminum
Every sign is .040-inch aluminum sheet. That is the gauge used for street and traffic signage, rigid enough to bolt to a fence and not flex in wind, thin enough to drill and mount with hand tools. It does not rust, because aluminum does not rust. It does not warp in heat, crack in cold, or soften in sun the way plastic does. A sign made this way is still a sign in a decade.
We do not make vinyl decals, laminated paper, coroplast, or thin plastic. We used to sell peel-and-stick. We stopped, because we watched them peel off vault lids, fade to pink on the south side of buildings, and crack on barricades in the first winter. A safety sign has one job, which is to still be legible on the day it matters, and that day might be five years after it went up.
The print: UV-stable inks
Signs are printed with UV-stable inks that hold contrast in full sun. The failure mode we designed against is the faded red DANGER header, the one that has drifted to pink and lost its signal-word authority. The header is the part of the sign the ANSI standard depends on, and it is the part that fails first on cheap signage.
The layout: ANSI Z535
Signal words, header colors, and layout follow the ANSI Z535 series, which is the format OSHA references and the one every trained reader recognizes. DANGER is red, white, and black. WARNING is orange. CAUTION is yellow. NOTICE is blue. The signal word tells the reader how bad the hazard is before they read another word, and we do not mix them up. A CAUTION sign on a Class 4 laser door understates the hazard to exactly the person who knows what the words mean.
Where OSHA mandates specific wording, the OSHA regulated-area substances in particular, we use the exact words the standard requires. The sign is the standard in those cases, and paraphrasing it is not compliance.
The mounting: pre-drilled, rounded
Four pre-drilled corner holes and rounded corners on every sign. Mount with screws, rivets, tapcons into block, zip ties through chain-link, or bolts through a post. We do not rely on adhesive, because adhesive lets go in July and the sign ends up face down in the gravel.
The size: 8x12, almost always
Nearly everything we make is 8 by 12 inches, landscape. It is readable at the distance a person decides whether to open a door or step past a fence, it fits on a panel face and a vault lid, and it is the size that lets us ship within 24 hours because we are not tooling for a dozen formats. We make exceptions when a hazard needs one.
Where and by whom
Designed and made in North Mississippi by a family-owned company whose founder spent more than a decade in telecom outside plant and fiber construction before making signs. Most of the catalog exists because of a specific site where the right sign would have helped and did not exist.
Turnaround
In-stock catalog signs ship within 24 hours, Monday through Friday. Custom signs ship on the timeline confirmed when the proof is approved.
What we are not
We are not the cheapest sign on Amazon. That sign is plastic. We are not a catalog of every sign ever made. We are the sign for the hazard nobody else makes a sign for, on a material that survives the place it is going, made by people who have stood there.
Browse the catalog or ask for a sign we do not make yet.
