The cloisonné or enamel emblem

A lost art

Many of our customers have discovered that we have been in the lead, if not the sole player, in the business of restoring antique and classic car emblems for many years. We have been developing this unique process since 1991. Unlike the jeweler or artistic type enameller, the restoration of enameled car emblems requires a very different, and specific skill set. In that time we have improved processes and obtained better materials when they became available.  We have upgraded and improved our processes in many ways since the early days, so that restoring a single emblem takes more time than it once did.  Lately, we have been falling further and further behind, causing our backlog to grow beyond a year.

Why is there so long a wait?

Many people are shocked with our long turn around time on restorations. That is very understandable and we truly apologize. There are a couple of reasons for this. 

First of all, it does take a long time to restore an emblem.  There are many preliminary metal processes, and some procedures that must be done offsite.  So even in a situation where only one emblem was on our schedule, the turn around time would probably be nearly two months.

Scheduling

Secondly, In order to operate more efficiently, we group all of the enamel emblem jobs onto a schedule.  In the beginning our schedules would have just a handful of emblems that we would turn around in a couple of month's time.  We also handle the plastic insert emblems. They are on a schedule as well.   This schedule is alternated with the enamel emblem schedule.  This, in effect, doubles the amount of time that one must wait if their emblem will be on the next schedule. 

The longer customers have to wait for an order to be turned around, the more additional customers have to be scheduled on the next schedule.  The larger that schedule grows, the longer it takes to complete.   At this point the schedules have stabilized.  It is not a good situation by any means, but we have made improving our turn around time a high priority.