Well exciting news for us! We have just launched our dedicated Stencil site at Canadastencil.com.  This will be for stock parking stencils, camo, workplace stencils and more.  We hope to eventually add pre made signage as well.

We will next be working on a dedicated site for all sorts of sign blanks for trade users in the sign industry.  We will be offering clear, alupanel, sintra and other panels in a variety of sizes and with or without holes.  We will also add laser cut and CNC cut letters too.

The stencil site is live now but in its early stages and the other site should follow in the next few months (at least for basic offerings). 

Graham

So a few years ago I purchased a "automatic" acrylic bending machine.  If you are in the acrylic fabrication world and you have dreamed about not sweating over a manual bender you may have seen these machines.  However there is very very little information from a western user about how useful they are so this is brief review and video (most people will never find this but who knows).

The machine is basically 2 quartz tube benders and 2 pressure platens and the sides bend up on the front and back to angle the acrylic after bending.  The width of the heating element opening can be adjusted and the metal the plastic is resting on is water cooled from a big trough under the machine (I replaced the pumps immediately to 120v pond pumps).

This is not a computerized machine - everything is done with relays and timers so its fairly complicated but also fairly simple.  An Arduino and a simple interface would really up its game.

The bottom line is that they are useful for some jobs where you can be doing other tasks at the same time and just pop back once every few minutes to reload it.  I just did a run of 30 L shaped angles and it worked great as I was edging parts and loading/unloading the CNC router while it chugged away.  Its not faster than manual bending as the cooling cycle is done on the bender but it does allow you to walk away as the heater stays retracted until the next cycle.

I'll try and do a full video review one day but for now see the video here.

I have fun memories of free hot tub that, as household of young men, we ripped out of a house, wired in to our rental and featured briefly in our parties (before the landlord decided to redevelop and kick us all out). I am not as interested in full price retail hot tubs.  The only good part of a new hot tub is that they install it.  

Well friends of ours were doing a reno and they had a little 2 person Spaberry hot tub that had a leak somewhere and they were going to upgrade.  We just had to get it, fix it and install it at our house.  

The getting it was OK as we could roll a trailer into the yard and slid it in (not as easy as it sounds but OK).  I then took it out to the shop for testing with my son helping (forklifts are great to lift a small tub in the air to look for leaks).  It leaked but luckily not from any of the pipes or valves, just the motor/wet end.  So weeks later I secured a used pump and assembly and eventually installed it.   All the usual fun work of rusting bolts, slightly different spacing and a tight working environment.  I was running out of curse words but I got it done.

Now the fun part, moving back and into our back yard.  It needed to go on its side but a unlike 90% of tubs this one had no frame  - its a 1 piece tub.  So chopped a pallet down, used the forklift and myself to flip it on its side.  I then made the pallet into a sled by screwing some arena board on to the bottom.  I know some of the professional hot tub moving people use arena board for this too.  Its cheap, slick and worked great.  Arena board is one of our best utility plastics for inexpensive slippery surfaces (like snowmobile decks, hockey shooting mats, boat trailer slides etc.)  Oh and getting off the truck? - I'm lucky as I have a driveway that sinks down a bit so I was able to reduce the drop to only a foot or so - ie slide it out at an angle and then lower it the final foot on one side.

The only bad part was we did stress the gel coat on the outside of the tub and ended up with a host of stress cracks. 

These are really only in the finish and not the fiberglass structure and they are all on the outside of the tub so I am not expecting any issues.  

By the end of it my back could use a nice hot tub - too bad it takes hours to heat up.

Well Dennis is back at it and I felt I should join him.  This will be a simple little post but its about the possibilities.   We are often asked about custom colours and we have to respond that not many are available and if they are available we need to sell a full sheet.  They also don't come in a huge range of colours (you can find a lot of designer colours online but they are typically custom runs requiring the purchase of thousands of pounds). 

What I often mention is that you can paint acrylic to get a really nice looking custom finish.  We used to do full sheets for Holt Refrew in their displays from time to time but I only have photos of my home project.   

​In our previous house we had a front door that opened directly into the living room.  While a common style it was not what we wanted so we came up with an inexpensive way to add a pony wall without actually adding anything.  We took a standard Ikea Kallax shelf (4x4) like this:

We then cut a piece of acrylic to match on the back side and painted it to match the walls.  We did what I describe as back painting it.  Which is just regular painting and then flipped around so that the paint is on the back when in place.  What you are left with is a very nice glossy, deep look with the colour chosen.  The actual paint is not that smooth - like walls aren't smooth - but because the acrylic sheet is very smooth that is what you see when you flip it around.  The actual paint is then at the back of the shelves where is is protected from scratches etc.  It works great!  This can also be used for backsplashes (though in a kitchen you would need to worry about the heat a bit).

1 year ago yesterday I blogged about how we would try and stay open and fully staffed during the downturn.  It's a good thing I'm not a fortune teller!

It has been a very busy year and we are very thankful and lucky that we have had an abundance of business and no outbreaks of Covid itself.  

It seems that the covid screen orders are winding down (though the numbers are going up fast this week)  and we hope to see everyone for the usual weird wacky and wonderful projects that make this such an interesting business.

Thank you to all our customers for your business and your patience over this last year.

PS:  After a year of steady pricing it looks all pricing is heading up in the short term.  It seems mainly to be due to that winter storm in Texas and hopefully some of the increases will disappear in time, but as with any increases I'm not holding my breath.

Graham

Well folks, what a ride this is!  We are in the midst of a surge in clear plastics that the world has never seen.  We have been selling yearly quantities of sheet for some material every month for 2.5 months now and the strain on the supply chain is showing.  

We are working hard to get plastics from a strong network of local distributors and manufacturers and for the most part we have been succeeding.  We have many pallets of materials coming in for June and beyond and we hope to serve as many customers as possible.  

And when this is all over, we hope we can help you with your point of purchase displays, literature holders, custom displays and plastic parts.  As the name implies, we've always been about plastics.  You won't read a magazine article about us 'pivoting' into this.  This is literally what we do and if you had asked for a customer barrier this time last year, we would have been ready to help you then too.

So thank you to all our customers, old and new, and we look forward for the day when we can help you with all your day to day needs again.

​Graham

This is just a personal follow up to our front page change on Covid19 and our stores.  As we sit here and watch the world hit the pause button it is good to think about how we view the world.  

I firmly believe that 'this too shall pass' though I do not know when.  In the meantime we all have a role to play in the process.  Please stay home if you do not need to be out, but if you are out, be mindful and treat your conduct as if you are infected and possibly spreading the virus.  The best case scenario will make it feel like an over reaction, that is good. The worst case is losing loved ones or at the very least knowing people who did.  

That said, as we only have 1 staff per 1000sqft or more, we will be open and working as best we can during the crisis.  This is a part of the social contract I feel business and employees have.  We have an obligation to stick with our staff in these hard times as they stick with us during busy times.  If orders fall through and we have nothing left to do (not the case so far) then we will clean, restock, make our offcuts into useful things, innovate with our equipment and generally get ready for the new reality.  If you have a business, take this time to do all the little things that don't get done.  Catch up.  We'll all be ready to go again by the time this is over.

Good luck out there, Graham

I spend a lot of time thinking of and working on brochure holders because our our other site www.brochureworld.ca . We stock brochure holders, mostly made in Canada, and custom make brochure holders, attachments and such things.  

Currently we are working on a project that is both simple and specialized.  We had a customer that needed a brochure holder to go around a custom retail display.  They would send out the holder which could be displayed in one of 3 locations.  2 of them were easy to do with our existing parts but one needed to wrap around or secure to a post.   We needed to make it look great, be very secure, and ideally be removable with no damage.    

We could have used double sided tape but once its on, its on and its very difficult to remove and clean the residue off. 

 Instead we designed a custom wrap around fixture with holes that matched parts of the existing fixture.  It is simple and effective and just the sore of thing we like to do for our customers.

These will go into production next week and we will also be individually packing them as a set and labeling them with the customers part code.

See more of our holders over at the Brochure World site.

Well as we all found out last week, spring has sprung in Great Vancouver and the Fraser Valley (I can practically see the grass growing in Fort Langley where I live).  

So with the return of the good weather we returned to the beaches of Bowen Island.  We go there often enough that to facilitate our crabbing adventures we keep a little dingy on the beach.  Its an old Livingston that seems to have had the vinyl removed in spots hence its name "LIVIN ON".  

Sadly, this winter it did not live on!  The particular beach it is on (and most of the northwestern side of Bowen) is known for its winter storms.  Its idyllic in summer but rather nasty in winter storm season.  

Ideally, we'd have brought the dingy up the beach or to the cabin for the winter but well with kids and school it was quickly forgotten until we received an ominous email from one of the powers that be up there that 'boats were at risk' due to waves and high tides.  We knew then that Livin' On would have a rough time of it and so it did! 

In the photo you can see the main damage to the bottom of one side where the fiberglass has split.  Its a little hard to see but the light that you see is coming through the boat and not under.  So that's up on the project list!  I spoke with a fellow out here in Abbotsford, 'Dan the boat Man' and so I have good idea of what to do (its pretty similar to what I suggest to people in store but always good to hear it from someone who does it hands on too). 

Basically I'll grind out the inside and apply overlapping patches, going bigger as I go.  Then I'll level the outside with a short strand filler and gelcoat over that.  It will look a little rough on the inside (maybe) but its only a beach dingy and after seeing the quick and dirty repair Western Canoe and Kayak did for on my beater canoe last year I think it will be fine.

Remember if you want to tackle these projects we have most everything you need (not sandpaper though) and if you don't we do recommend Dan the Boat Man and Western Canoe and Kayak depending on your project.