Word soon spread about our company’s newfound focus – and expertise – in designing digital signage that went above and beyond the expectations of clients. Our work with remote DVI programming for ATMs, our prowess at metalworking, our successful partnership with a respected Taiwanese PCB assembly house, and our own work ethic and optimal turnaround times began to turn heads. Ultimately, it led to a well-known company in the maritime cruise industry contacting us to design a special form of digital signage for its ships that would put our newly-honed skills to the challenge. Naturally, we accepted.

They wanted us to design a NEMA Type 4X enclosure for a digital signage application located below-decks on a cruise ship; in fact, these pieces of signage were to be located in the galley of the ship, and would serve as both inventory displays and as monitors. As many of our readers will doubtless know, a NEMA 4X enclosure is an especially rugged form of protective enclosure for electrical equipment, providing proof against water (in all its various liquid and solid forms), thereby safeguarding the enclosure and its contents from any water-related intrusion or corrosion. Given the especially corrosive nature of seawater, we certainly knew we had our work cut out for us.

Using corrosion-resistant stainless steel, in addition to using watertight adhesion tape on the back panel of each screen to ensure that all screens remained watertight, we were quickly able to fabricate the necessary signage per our customer’s specifications. We devised a 42” screen for the galley of the ship, submitted it to our client, and now it’s being tested aboard the actual cruise-ship. All indications point to a “successful maiden voyage” for our digital signage.

We continue to develop our portfolio in the fast-growing arena of digital signage. Putting our partnership with Taiwan to good effect, we now have contractual and/or pending assignments with a range of companies and industries that want to take advantage of the new technology. We look forward to telling you about more of our work in this field, as well as hearing your thoughts, feedback, and queries about our specific capabilities.

We take on all kinds of fabrication jobs at York Haven all the time. Quite frequently, the assignments are one-time runs: a company asks us to complete an assignment, we complete it, and then we part ways for the time being. But our recent work producing digital signage for the banking industry has led us to some interesting conclusions about our business possibilities, more of which we will be discussing in forthcoming blogs. In the meantime, we will focus this week on the assignment that fostered a whole new line of strategy for our company.

A client in the banking industry asked us to put together a series of screens that could be mounted into ATM machines. The client told us the digital signage would be used to advertise daily rates for the bank, as well as provide a platform for special promotions for new financial products. What they asked us to build was fairly straightforward: a 19” screen that could be accessed from the back and reprogrammed by a bank technician whenever needed. But upon investigating our options and looking at several case studies and prototypes, we realized that we were capable of delivering a product that went above and beyond what our client had originally requested.

We reasoned we could build a digital screen that could be programmed to reboot without there being any need for a bank technician to manually open and close the teller. With the help of a PCB assemblage partner in Taiwan, we would be able to provide our client with a digital screen that automatically rebooted from a technical booth from afar. It would save our client vital man-hours of technical support, and would provide faster and more efficient service.

With its built-in DVI connection, our screen was able to accommodate thumb-drives and SD cards, something which our client had not ever expected. Our client was so pleased with our work that it led us to the conclusion that digital signage was a ripe field for business. As will be seen in upcoming blogs, our instincts were spot-on.

From the sound-bites you hear on the evening news to the statistics you read in specialty trade journals, the evidence seems compelling:  American manufacturing is on the (cautious) rise again from the so-called “dark days” of 2008-2009. Just last month, the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA) released a Business Conditions Report that surveyed 132 metal-forming companies in the United States and Canada. According to the PMA report, 41% of the companies surveyed anticipated an uptick in business for their first quarters of 2012, whereas only 5% foresaw a downturn. While there were certainly some obstacles to increased productivity for 2011 (the Arab Spring, which saw an overall rise in oil prices; the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and the flooding in Thailand, which together saw disrupted supply chains), industrial productivity increased across the board in North America.

It is one thing to see it on the news and read it in the papers, but it’s another thing entirely to be at the forefront of the event itself. Here at York Haven Fabricators, we can attest to the good economic prognosis by simply pointing to our own factory floor. During the course of a single month this year, we’ve hired eight new workers for our company, bringing the sum total to 36. While we pride ourselves on never having to fire or lay off a single worker from our workforce throughout the Great Recession, we’re even more proud to be bringing new faces onto our team, thereby boosting our wherewithal across the board.
We’re particularly pleased as far as our increased welding capabilities, since judging by the statistics (huge increases in demand for welders in regions as various as Nebraska, Texas, and North Dakota), we’re anticipating a much greater demand for such services throughout this year. We’ve beefed up our second shift of welders and cut back on our overtime to the point where we anticipate welding at full capacity 18 hours a day in addition to weekends.

With an increased number of workers, we’ve seen our working capabilities rise exponentially. We’re looking to taking our company to new and better heights this year, as we investigate new leads and opportunities from a range of different industries. It’s no hard thing to admit that American manufacturing has had a difficult few years, but we believe that given all the new surges in traffic and work orders, our own workforce will only surge in numbers as well.

The simple fact is that many applications require a great deal of maintenance over the course of time. That goes double for the large industrial turbines that power today’s windmills. In order to function, windmill turbines require the dirt and grease that gets hurled their way to be properly cleaned. In cases like this, industrial washing cabinets are needed. These bulky containers are designed to encompass large surface areas that are in need of industrial-strength cleaning for whatever reason.

Recently, a client from Baltimore contacted our company to fabricate a series of industrial wash cabinets for various applications. The smallest of these cabinets was around the size of a small refrigerator. The largest (the one intended for cleaning windmill turbines) we soon realized couldn’t actually be fitted through the door of our factory if we’d chosen to build it inside. All the same, that didn’t stop us from taking on the challenge of building it outdoors.

The client didn’t have any blueprints at hand to help with the design. Instead, we relied entirely on reverse-engineering based off a virtual model; a little bit like driving a hundred miles down the interstate by way of watching a computer screen.

Once we’d figured out what it took to build each of the giant washing cabinet’s parts correctly, we set about fabricating it using stainless steel. Sure enough, our careful study of the virtual model paid off handsomely: we were able to complete the enormous assignment a full week ahead of the original deadline set by our client. The machine was then shipped to its final destination in Europe. Currently, there is the possibility of building two more of these machines for our client.

We’re glad we can offer another top-grade application here at York Haven Fabricators. Whatever the assignment, whether it’s a job that’s familiar to us or not: we work tirelessly at mastering our craft in order to guarantee our customer’s satisfaction and ease.