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60+ Years of Experience

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Short Lead Times

Month: February 2016

Curious About Control Panels?

Control panels and control displays from Hallmark Nameplate are manufactured to the highest quality using reliable, consistent materials. Hallmark Nameplate can create a control panel assembly that is ready-to-go, including all interfaces, controls, displays, and electronics. Our engineering and design departments can also help you with color and graphics as well as electronics. 

The control panel assembly selected will meet the electrical and mechanical engineering design to ANSI/IPC standards. It will be designed for test reliability and manufacturability. The Hallmark Nameplate process includes a prototype and production assembly with in-circuit and functional testing available.

Hallmark Nameplate control panel assemblies can be applied to: 

Computer Peripherals
A peripheral device is generally defined as any auxiliary device, such as a computer mouse or keyboard that connects to and works with the computer in some way. Other examples of peripherals are image scanners, tape devices, microphones, loudspeakers, webcams, and digital cameras. While these are some of the more common peripherals, there are many other kinds as well. Just remember that any external device that provides input to the computer or receives output from the computer is considered a peripheral.

There are both input and output peripherals for a computer. The ones mentioned above are considered input peripherals. Output peripherals include computer displays, printers, projectors, and computer speakers.

Food Service
When it comes to climate control, having a high-quality control panel in the food service industry is a no-brainer. There are many elements of food production facilities that need to be taken into consideration when creating a control panel to work for you. For example, a lot of the potent chemical cleaning compounds used to sanitize the facilities could damage a normal, unprotected thermostat. Additionally, access to thermostat and unit controls, specifically employees “tampering” with it while also wanting centralized unit control for ease and productivity is another challenge that Hallmark Nameplate will take into consideration if this is your concern.

Industrial Controls
Industrial control panels are defined as an assembly of two or more power circuit components, control circuit components, or any combination of power and control circuit components. Examples include motor controllers, switches, relays, and auxiliary devices. The panels may include disconnect means and motor branch-circuit protective devices. The UL Listed industrial control panel does not include coverage of any externally connected loads. Industrial control panels covered by UL product category NITW are intended for general-use industrial applications for the control of heaters, lighting, motors or pump loads or a combination of these loads, and are intended for installation in ordinary locations in accordance with the NEC. Industrial control panels may also be designated for the control of specific equipment — such as industrial machinery, cranes, refrigeration equipment and fountains — which may not be suitable for use with other equipment as well as industrial control panels that have been investigated for special applications covered by other UL product categories. At Hallmark Nameplate, we can produce a control panel that suits your needs in whatever industrial category your business falls into.

Medical Equipment
A control panel overlay for medical equipment serves as not just a brand identifier but also improves the lifespan of the equipment. Whether it’s a heart monitor in a hospital or a thermometer in a doctor’s office, the equipment used to treat people every day deserves quality, durable materials that contribute to its longevity and provide quick and simple identification when time is of the essence.

OEM Devices
If you’re an OEM, or Original Equipment Manufacturer, you’re making a part or subsystem that is used in another company’s end product. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need a quality control panel to get the job done! If you’re part of a technical assembly process, your business could benefit from a high-quality control panel to get the job done quickly and with ease.

Telecommunication Devices
A telecommunication device is one that exchanges information between two or more entities. Think of a home security system…that’s all about control panels. Creating these devices with Hallmark Nameplate control panels means that you will be keeping your customers feeling safe, and your product looking and feeling smooth and functional.

Transportation Devices
Don’t think transportation devices need control panels? Think again! If you require controls for equipment and vehicles for refuse, emergency, oil, and gas, or utility and maintenance applications, a Hallmark Nameplate control panel is the way to go. Fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency response vehicles can include systems such as timers and relays, power distribution modules, lighting, and hydraulic controllers, keypads for equipment controls, indicator panels, and many more.

Hallmark Nameplate provides engineering support services including component programming, ICT and functional testing. The control panel assembly can be finished in anti-glare, high gloss, matte or velvet. If you’re ready to get your new project started, contact us today!

Get to Know Your Nameplate Substrates

Get to Know Your Nameplate Substrates: Polycarbonate (Lexan)

Previously, we blogged about an available nameplate substrate called Mylar. While this material is great for some applications, there are plenty of other substrates to explore, and we are going to continue on with our series.

One of the many substrates that are available for a nameplate is polycarbonate or Lexan. Nameplates, in general, provide decorate, informative solutions that enhance your product, while offering quick turnaround time without sacrificing quality. Nameplate production includes labels and overlays that don’t require embossing or extensive engineering. Compared to graphic overlays, nameplates offer faster production and lower pricing with high quality and consistency always in mind.

Used in engineering, polycarbonates are strong, tough, but also flexible materials, and some grades are optically transparent. They are easily worked, molded, and thermoformed. Because of these properties, polycarbonates find many applications…one of which could be your next nameplate! Products made from polycarbonate can contain the precursor monomer Bisphenol A. The subsurface printing process done in this nameplate production protects your designs, including color and graphic images, from cleaners, solvents, abrasives, and even a variety of climates and outdoor elements.

Where did polycarbonates come from? They were first discovered in 1898 by Alfred Einhorn, a German scientist working at the University of Munich. After 30 years of laboratory research, this class of materials was abandoned without commercialization. Research resumed again in 1953, when Hermann Schnell at Bayer in Uerdingen, Germany patented the first linear polycarbonate.

So you might be wondering what the explicit benefits are to having polycarbonate as your nameplate substrate. Here are a few reasons to choose this substrate:

  • It has a wide temperature tolerance, making it applicable to many different types of equipment and environments.
  • It is available in a relatively large range of thickness from .005” to .025”.
  • It is available in gloss, velvet, and matte finishes, making it the most versatile substrate for finishes.
  • Polycarbonate is suitable for indoor and outdoor applications, which speaks to its wide temperature tolerance and different purposes.
  • It has available flammability ratings from ULVTM-2 to UL94V0

These features of polycarbonate are balanced out with impact resistance and optical properties. It has high impact resistance and low scratch-resistance. Additionally, engineering plastics have gradually replaced traditional engineering materials such as wood or metal in many applications. Besides equaling or surpassing them in weight, strength, and other properties, engineering plastics are much easier to manufacture, especially in complicated shapes. So if you’re looking to apply your new nameplate to a contoured surface, it is certainly recommended that a polycarbonate substrate is used to ensure the best coverage and the highest quality product we can make for you.

Polycarbonate nameplates are printed on the underside of the transparent material, allowing the polycarbonate itself to provide protection from the elements. It is a durable and economical labeling solution, with the capability to enhance product appearance with crisp, vibrant, and precise graphics.

Unlike most thermoplastics, polycarbonate can undergo large plastic deformations without cracking or breaking. As a result, it can be processed and formed at room temperature using sheet metal techniques, such as bending on a break.  This makes it valuable in prototyping applications where transparent or electrically non-conductive parts are needed, which cannot be made from metal.

Polycarbonate is just one of many substrates available for your newest nameplate to be created on. At Hallmark Nameplate, we take into consideration every variable to suit your specific needs and being so versatile, polycarbonate just might be the one for you! Some variables we will take into consideration include:

  • The type of surface it will be mounted to
  • Indoor or Outdoor application
  • Type of Finish; Gloss, Velvet or Matte
  • Serialization & barcodes
  • Display windows (LED, LCD)
  • Drawings and art files available
  • Domed elements
  • UL or CSA requirements

We have more than 55 years of experience behind us, so when it’s time to start working on your next project, our team will be able to walk you through the entire development process, from start to finish, to make sure that you have the right nameplate for your specific needs and application. Our facility gives us the ability to offer both screen and digital printing on materials from 3-.030 in.

Still have questions? Contact Hallmark Nameplate today for the highest quality, from your first inquiry to your finished product.

The History of the Bar Code

In 1932, an ambitious project was conducted by a small group of students headed by Wallace Flint at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. The project proposed that customers select desired merchandise from a catalog by removing corresponding punched cards from the catalog. These punched cards were then handed to a checker who placed the cards into a reader. The system then pulled the merchandise automatically from the storeroom and delivered it to the checkout counter. A complete customer bill was produced and inventory records were updated. This was the very start of a revolutionary element to business everywhere: the bar code.

The modern bar code emerged in 1948. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans to undertake research to develop a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend, Norman Joseph Woodland about the request, and he began to work on the problem.

Like with most creations, there was a period of trial-and-error. Woodland’s first idea utilized patterns of ink that would glow under ultraviolet light. He and Silver build something that worked, but it had problems with ink stability and it was expensive to print the patterns necessary. But, like with most creators, Woodland was determined to get it right. He took some stock market earnings, quit his teaching job at Drexel, and moved to his grandfather’s Florida apartment to have more time to work on the problem.

On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application titled “Classifying Apparatus and Method.” The inventors described their invention as relating “to the art of article classification…through the medium of identifying patterns.”

Their symbology was made up of a pattern of four white lines on a dark background. The first line was called a “datum” line and the positions of the remaining three lines were fixed in respect to the first line. Information was coded by the presence or absence of one or more of the lines. The more lines able to be formatted on the bar code, the more classifications could be coded.

In 1962, Silver died at age thirty-eight before having seen the commercial use of the bar code. Woodland, on the other hand, was awarded the 1992 National Medal of Technology by President Bush, however, neither men made much money on the idea that started a billion-dollar business.

The bar code was not commercialized until 1966 when the National Association of Food Chains put out a call to equipment manufacturers for systems that would speed the checkout process. It wasn’t until 1969, however, that a proposal for an industry-wide bar code system. A year later, RCA installed one of the first scanning systems at a Kroger store in Cincinnati. The product codes were represented by “bulls-eye barcodes”, a set of circular bars and spaces of varying widths. This is so different from what we see today! The problem with these codes is that they weren’t pre-printed on the item’s packaging, rather, they were labels that were put on the items by Kroger employees. With problems like these arising, it was recognized that the industry would have to agree on a standard coding scheme open to all equipment manufacturers to use and to be adopted by all food producers and dealers.

Three years later, the U.S. Supermarket Ad Hoc Committee recommended the adoption of the UPC symbol set that’s still used in the United States today. It was submitted by IBM and developed by George Laurer, whose work was considered an outgrowth of the ideas of Woodland and Silver. At the time, Woodland was an employee of IBM.

We’re exposed to bar codes so frequently in our daily lives that we don’t acknowledge why they’re important. And the truth is that they’re important for the same reasons now as they were when the idea was originally conceived: to simplify the tracking, movement, and status of products. Your business needs bar codes, and at Hallmark Nameplate, we’re able to produce nameplates with bar codes to help your business operate seamlessly. With 55 years of experience under our belts, we will be able to analyze your precise needs, process every variable to suit your business, and use state of the art equipment to produce this enhancing product quickly and with high quality.

Considering adding bar codes to your business? We like the way you think. Contact us today with any questions you may have.

Hallmark Employee Creates Canes for Veterans in Need

At Hallmark Nameplate, we take great pride in the quality of our work and the expertise we have mastered over the last 55 years. However, another great part of our business that we have do not always have the opportunity to show our customers is our employees, who are dedicated not just to their job in the workplace, but also to others outside of work.

Oscar Morris, one of our outstanding Hallmark employees has recently been acknowledged from Channel 6 news in Orlando for his work with veterans; specifically, his construction and distribution of custom canes for veterans in need. Hallmark is a veteran-owned company and has many employees who are veterans as well, and this could be one of many veteran spotlights on our blog.

Morris is a United States Navy veteran, and customizes each cane that he makes, filling the need of the specific veteran he’s creating for, and brands the cane with a penny from the year that particular veteran enlisted in the military. This certainly makes the cane not only fully functional for the veteran in question, but the nice touch of personalization with the penny speaks to his dedication to quality and to the pride he takes in his work and pleasing the recipients of these wonderful pieces. The materials, mainly the trees themselves, come both from the community as well as over 200 trees that were recently donated from Lowe’s.

Recently, he was recognized by the media for personally handing his first cane to a Korean War veteran, who has been patiently waiting three months to get his new walking cane. Morris was beyond pleased with the reaction from the veteran he visited because he doesn’t usually hand-deliver the canes to his “customers”. Mailing them out is very different, and being able to see their reaction through their face is priceless, as Morris said in the news piece. It’s certainly not the same as getting a response through email!

While this project is somewhat new to him, Morris has been making art out of wood since he was a child, so you could say that he’s been “training” for this his whole life. His inspiration began back in September, when he came across a strong broken tree limb, and decided to make a cane out of it.

Morris knew how difficult it could be for veterans to walk, considering he is a Navy veteran himself and comes from a long line of veterans. After making his first cane out of that broken tree limb, he brought it to his local doctor’s office and received a positive response from other veterans who were there. People certainly loved it.

From there, Morris took to the internet to spread the word around about what he was trying to do. He created a Facebook page called “Free Canes for Veterans ‘How to’” and interacts very regularly with those who post on his page with questions, requests, and all sorts of other information about his accomplishments. Just a few short days after creating the Facebook page for his cause, the internet went wild and Morris began receiving hundreds of orders.

People on his Facebook page seem to be doing one of several things: watching his “how to” videos (he recently posted one about how to repurpose your Christmas tree by making a cane), requesting a cane, or inquiring about trees or materials that they would like to donate. It’s safe to say that the community is definitely attesting to the kindness and quality Morris displays on his page and in his wooden canes.

Since his Facebook page began and he has received so many requests, Morris has recruited four of his friends to assist in making the canes and help run his Facebook page. With all the requests, Morris has had to stop taking orders in order to catch up to the 500 ones that have already been placed, and after that, their strategy is to continue making canes for combat-related veterans moving forward.

Hallmark Nameplate is proud to have Oscar Morris as a part of their community, and as a veteran-owned and run company, we are thrilled to see one of our own take their skills and attention to quality and care that we put into our products and apply that same strategy to help those in need.