Customer Profile - City of Manchester Parks and Recreation

In central Iowa, the small town Manchester has about 5,000 residents. The Parks and Recreation for the City of Manchester manages seven parks, numerous trails, aquatic center, recreation center, tennis courts, basketball courts, and even a pond that serves as the venue for water ski shows.

“We have a park sign located at the entrance of each of our parks,” says Doug Foley, director of Parks and Recreation for the City of Manchester. “We have the recycled plastic park entrance signs placed at the most visible location for the park in a nice flower bed to create an inviting entrance.”

The park signs made from high density polyethylene are four and half feet wide by three feet tall. The recycled plastic park signs are speckled grey with the park name and logo of the city skyline routed out exposing the black layer of the recycled plastic board.

“We like the signs because they do what we are looking for and it is an environmentally responsible product,” says Foley. “We can keep continuity between our parks.” Although, the original signs where installed sometime ago we were able to match new signs to the same format and style as the older ones.

We have helped the Parks and Recreation for the City of Manchester develop more visually appealing artwork for the signs while keeping the park name as the focus of the sign. “The signs are durable. We have had them in our parks for over a decade and you can hardly tell they have been used,” says Foley. “You can barely tell which one is an old sign and which is the new one.”

From Your Imagination to Your Park Sign


 

Whether the your artwork for the park sign is scribbled on a napkin or delivered to us in a vector art file (a.k.a. vector graphic file), we work with you to make the park sign meet your exacting requirements. If you don’t have the staff to develop the artwork into a vector graphic file, we are able to help you with that too. 

Vector Art Work



Once we have the artwork in digital form, we enter it into our production software. The artwork information is digitally transferred to our CNC Routing System. We then apply tool paths which map out the pathways that the routing bit will take over the blank HDPE sign board to create your custom designed park sign.

You have a variety of color combinations for your recycled plastic sign including these common sandwich styles:

Beige/Brown/Beige

Brown/Beige/Brown

Beige/Green/Beige

Green/Beige/Green

By using contrasting color combinations, we create for you a customized park sign that is durable and has great visual appeal. With the three color layers and the thickness of the boards, we can also route both sides of the HDPE park sign which means more cost savings for you.

With the routed recycled plastic sign you have a park sign that you can put in the field and you don’t have to pay attention to it—unless you want to admire how good it looks.

Another benefit of the way we handle your artwork files is that if you are improving your park’s system signage over the course of several years we can consistently provide artwork and board colors that exactly match the original signs from us.

Park-Signs Happy Customer:

“When we order the signs they always are the same. They blend in well and are consistent in size, color, and font text. Every time I order, they are exactly like the ones I ordered before which is important in keeping the overall consistency of the park’s signs.” Todd Younkin, deputy director, Preservation Parks of Delaware County, Ohio.

Routing Artwork

Getting a park sign to look just like what you imagined begins with great artwork, a durable high density polyethylene (HDPE) board, and our CNC Routing System. A CNC Router is a computer numerical controlled system which means the computer controls the pathways the router bit takes on the recycled plastic signs. 


We utilize this technology to layout the tool paths for the router to cut the appropriate logos, numbers, and letters out of the 4 x 8 foot recycled plastic sheet. Our HDPE sheets are a combination of two outside colors and one contrasting inside color. This long-lasting “sandwich” style sheet is created from bringing together the three color layers of plastic when it is still in the molten state. The result is a strong recycled plastic sign that is impossible to delaminate.

CNC in action



The computer controlled routing system combined with the durability of the pigmented HDPE allows us to carve as small as one-inch in lettering size for your sign. This provides you with the ability to add more detail to your park signs than you ever would be able to with a hand routed wooden sign.

We also have the versatility to do very large park entrance signs. The largest sign we have completed is at the Lorain County Regional Airport in Ohio. The entrance sign measures 96H x 360W inches.

By routing our recycled plastic signs using the CNC Routing System, we create unique park signs with structural depth that are weather and graffiti resistant. Since the HDPE has no surface porosity, is very smooth, and has a water absorption rate of less than 1 percent—nothing sticks to the surface this includes dirt, mildew, mold, or graffiti.

The Right Pigments Will Save You Time and Money



Color Pigments



The pigments we use in our recycled plastic boards are much like the pigments used to color paint and can come from organic or inorganic sources and are water-and oil-insoluble. The use of pigments has been around for thousands of years. Common colors used were sienna, umber, and ochre which are all naturally mined pigments. Other organic pigments that were manufactured include iron oxide and carbon black. Synthetically produced organic pigments are made from petroleum, coal tar, and natural gas. Organic pigments are able to maintain their colorfastness even when exposed to sunlight and variable weather.

Pigments provide many color options and by combining pigments the color choices are limitless. However, the best way to help protect the park sign colors from fading and chalking is to first choose colors that are light stable. Light stable colors hold together and resist fading and chalking from exposure to direct sunlight. A poor light stable color can’t be saved by even the best UV stabilizer.



Routed Signs on
Plastic Lumber Post Structure



It’s important to also protect the high density polyethylene (HDPE) boards from damaging UV rays by using UV stabilizers to insure that the recycled plastic park signs have lasting color, beauty, and durability in direct sunlight applications. Overall, to have park signs that have a long life span you need both the appropriate UV stabilizers for the recycled high density polyethylene and color pigments which will not fade.



Plastic Lumber Frame
with a Digitally Printed
Vinyl Insert



Fortunately for the parks and recreation industry, the best light stable colors for HDPE outdoor signage are green, brown, beige, and black.  We have 19 different color choices to meet your needs. We recommend the earth tones because they resist fading or chalking which is common in brighter, less light stable colors such as red, yellow, and orange.

However, if your application requires these bright colors we can provide them. We can also provide tailor made colors. In fact, you can choose just about any color for your park signs and we even have a system that allows for printed vinyl graphics to be added to the signs.

Imagine a World Where You Never Have to Paint a Park Sign Again...

Outdoor signs are, well, outdoors in the sweltering sun or freezing cold weather. Your outdoor signage needs to be tough enough to handle Mother Nature as well as teenagers (I’ll talk about graffiti in another post).

Whether the signs are for the park entrance, trail marker, or parking, your park signage has to withstand the constant exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. Recycled plastic signs made from unprotected high density polyethylene (HDPE) will begin to breakdown with the exposure to UV rays. This results in chalking and fading of the park sign. The best way to increase the longevity of the recycled plastic signs is to protect it from damaging sunlight by having UV stabilizers incorporated throughout the HDPE board.

To protect our HDPE boards we use a hindered amine light stabilizer (HALS). It is very effective at preventing degradation of the HDPE. Another benefit of using HALS is simply the way it works because as the HALS stabilizes the high density polyethylene from UV exposure, HALS are regenerated.

Long story short...you don’t have to worry about your recycled plastic park signs fading or chalking.

Since our recycled plastic boards are made with the UV stabilizers, pigments, and raw HDPE blended together during the production process the UV stabilizers and color is consistent throughout the entire board. This means that you won’t have to worry about fading or chalking of park signs with routed words and images. (You can’t say that about routed wood signs that require scraping, sanding, painting, and sealing every spring.)

Park signs created from HDPE using the right pigments mixed with the proper UV stabilizers will last at least 50 years—that’s one less item on your annual to-do list for the rest of your career.

Park-Signs Happy Customer:

“We have put new park signs up next to signs that have been out in the field for years and haven’t seen a noticeable difference even when they are side-by-side. There is no difference in color, size, or anything. That’s even with the older sign being exposed to the elements.” Todd Younkin, deputy director, Preservation Parks of Delaware County, Ohio.