When I joined C.P. Dean's team on September 1st, 2021, I knew essentially nothing. I truly had no clue what was going on, especially in the awards department. Of course, I had held a cue stick before, threw a dart, and had some idea of the name Olhausen. When a customer would come in with an award, Clint would ask them what they wanted engraved and also the process of getting the words onto the material that they preferred. He used big words like burnishing, scratch engraving, sublimation, sand blasting, and laser engraving. In my head, I thought everything was the same. I simply just wanted the words to be written on a metal plate.
The simplest one that we like is sublimation. Sublimate is defined by Marriam-Webster as to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state. This process happens with dry ice. The water in the dry ice goes straight from a solid state to a gaseous state. It also happens at C.P. Dean when we make many of our plaques and awards. To do this process, we print a special kind of ink onto a special kind of paper and perfectly align the paper onto the item that we would like to sublimate. We then stick the item and the paper under a heat press with the right pressure, heat, and time setting applied. The ink then transfers from a solid state to a gaseous state and applies directly to the product, leaving a permanent imprint.
One time, someone came in the day before Halloween. We had ruined their Halloween costume. It was us. We made the mistake. We spelled a Meredith Grey name tag as Meredith Gray - ruining the whole idea of “Grey’s Anatomy”. Since David was not in the store that day (a Saturday) to get the sublimation machine running, it was up to me to save the costume. I found the file, measured the name tag, and heated up the heat press. The temperature was 10 degrees away from being at the right temperature and it seemed pretty hot. It was taking what felt like forever to heat up that last little bit. The customer was waiting right outside the door and I figured I might as well try and see if that temperature would work. I went ahead and started the process, pulled out the name tag, and it was white. No imprint whatsoever. I waited the last little bit for the heat press to fully heat up and tried to use the same paper to imprint on the plastic name tag and it did nothing. All of the ink had evaporated and there was only a faint residue left of the paper that would not create any imprint. My lack of patience had gotten the best of me in this situation. I reprinted it, did the process again with a fully heated up machine and viola! - the name tag was perfect. Halloween 2021 was saved.
Sublimation is one of the best ways to adhere information onto a hard object. It is colorful, easy to design, and very adaptable to different kinds of products. Sand blasting, scratch, and laser engraving do not allow for a colorful image to be placed on an object, while sublimation allows for full color photos to be adhered to awards. We hope you will come check out our sublimated name tags, plaques, metal plates, ornaments, and many other items. And we promise we won’t ruin your Halloween costume.
