Our Facility and Equipment

Art Sign Works, Inc has a strong national presence, with over 1000 sign shops and distributors located throughout the US who  sell our products.. Most of our manufacturing operations and personnel  are located on a 14,000 ft2 factory we own in two adjacent industrial buildings in Murrieta, CA, at 41785 Elm Street, Suite 302, in the Temecula Valley located in  Riverside County in Southern California.  The Temecula Valley is well-known for its over fifty boutique wineries and vineyards. Our factory is located 60 miles north of San Diego, and about 100 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. We are surrounded by beautiful mountains, the highest being Mt. Jacinto, 10,834 ft, snow-capped in winter.  Our customer relations staff, project coordinators, computer design facility and manufacturing factory are located at our Murrieta facility. We design and fabricate over 10,000 signs and plaques each year in this facility. All of our products and 95% of our raw materials are "Made in the USA". Our production team is shown below and our various work shops are described in the paragraphs below.

In our factory we have extensive computer design facilities, a fully-equipped Computer-Numerically-Controlled (CNC) Router Shop with 6 router/carvers, 3-D Printers, a Wood Shop, a Metal Shop, a Paint Spray  Shop, a Fine Painting  and Finishing Shop, a Photo area, and a Packing & Shipping Shop described below. The  video below the team photo below  on this page gives a very brief overview of our manufacturing process.

CNC ROUTER , CARVING AND 3-D PRINTING SHOP 

CNC Large Table Routers. We use computers extensively to design our plaques and control the machines that perform the initial carving of our plaques. In our Computer-Numerically-Controlled (CNC) Router Shop, we have seven (7)  large routing/carving machines: 

1. 12 x 5 ft table with Automatic Tool Changer and high Gantry

2. 10 x 5 ft table with Automatic Tool Changer

4. 8 x 5 ft table for 3-D carving

6. Four (4) 4 x 4 ft tables for 3-D carving

These are full-capability computer driven machines that  automatically  and precisely carve both 3-D,   2.5-D multi-level, and engraved designs in High-Density-Urethane (HDU), and all species of wood. They can also cut out and engrave  plastics such as HDPE, Acrylic, MDO, and thin sheet aluminum. To run these machines, we develop 3-D and 2.5-D geometric models of the plaque or sign to be carved using our design software ASPIRE,  which is hosted on eight computers in our facility and in remote locations where our contract 3-D designers are located. These models are input into computers which control our routers, where they are  converted into tool paths used to guide the high-speed rotating router bits as they carve the plaques. These are precision machines with an accuracy of 0.01 inches  in all three dimensions. It takes from 1 hour to as much as 24 hours to carve one sign or plaque on one of these versatile precision machines, depending on the size and intricate details of the plaque. 3-D signs or plaques take much  longer to carve than 2.5-D signs or plaques.

3-D Printers. We  have three ELEGOO 3-D printers that we use to make very precise 3-D smaller plaques, up to 10 inches in size and 0.1 inch up to several inches thick. These can make 3-D bas-relief, half-relief and even full relief (stand-alone 3-D) art pieces and appliques for larger signs and plaques. We  can make small 3-D models of objects like ship anchors, cannons, ships, boats, autos, animals, people, etc and mount them on our HDU or wood plaques and signs. The photo on the right shows a typical 3-D printed object, a Viking Warrior. Note the detail. These printed 3-D art pieces   are made of strong, tough photopolymer resin filament  and can be painted in sign enamel colors or metal plated in bronze, brass, aluminum or copper. 

We also store large number of sheets of wood, HDU and other substrate materials waiting to be put on the router tables, as well as storing  the carved plaques when they come off the  tables. Fig 1 below shows photos taken in our CNC Router and Wood Shops.

WOOD  AND METAL SHOPS

These shops are next door to our CNC Router Shop.   We have  a large sandblast booth (handles up to 14 feet signs), and a complete woodworking shop with many saws, routers, sanders, planers, joiners, drills, lathes, and 5 fine sanding and polishing tables.  We have a complete dust collection system that reduces the wood and HDU dust from cutting, carving, sanding and drilling operations. We also have a metal shop  where we can cut, bend, and weld various metals, and make custom aluminum signs, wrought iron hangers, and steel and aluminum posts and frames and other metal structures.  We  have access to a CNC water-jet cutter and a CNC high-power laser that can cut elaborate metal shapes precisely.  In our Metal shop, we also have a metal-plating  and polishing facility (bronze, brass, copper, silver-nickel, aluminum and stainless steel). Fig 2 below shows a panorama view of our Wood Shop.

SPRAY AND FINE PAINTING  SHOPS  

We have a  two full-capability paint shops, a Paint Spray Shop, and a Fine Painting & Finishing Shop, both separated from the Wood Shop, to eliminate any dust problems.  Figs 3  below shows views of  our Paint Spray Shop . We have a 15 ft wide  paint spray booth,  a large number of Matthews MAP and 1-Shot paint cans of various colors, computer paint mixing equipment,  metal plating materials, a heated humidity and temperature controlled drying room, and paint sprayers. In our 2500 ft2 Fine Painting & Finishing Shop across the street we have 5 artists who use artist-brushes, airbrushes and mini-rollers to paint text, borders, and artwork with 1-Shot Sign Enamels.   We can also  print full-color digital vinyl giclee photo appliques for our  plaques. We also have gold-leaf and silver-leaf gilding equipment and burnishing tools in our Fine Painting & Finishing Shop.  Visitors to our factory are welcome any time during our business hours. We will be pleased to give you a tour of our factory and show you some signs in work, as well as a few finished  signs.