Why does it take 4 weeks to produce a weathervane?

All of the weathervanes, signs and other metalwork you see on this website are designed here in the Scottish borders. Sometimes i draw in a sketchbook, sometimes onto a graphics tablet that puts my work straight onto the computer; either way a lot of hours are put into it. Bespoke designs often go back and forth between us and the customer making alterations, and this is juggled between welding, painting and general life raising a young family.

Good laser cutting machines are prohibitively expensive for a small family business like us. We could get a smaller budget one, but would have to scale back our design work fairly significantly to accomodate its capabilities. We have a good relationship with a regular laser cutter who we've been using for nearly 10 years - they're a family run business too. But, they have a minimum order charge, so we send our work through in batches. Also as we are in a rural area, delivery charges up here mean a pallet of steel could really add quite a bit onto the cost of a weathervane or sign and we don't want to do that, so that's another reason we wait until we have a decent batch of designs needing cutting. This means that if we are very busy and getting lots of orders through the website, we can make up a batch in a few days, but when we're quiet, it can take a couple of weeks. Plus then we have a few days to wait for the steel to be cut and delivered to our workshop.

So you can see we've not even done any welding yet and could easily be over 2 weeks into the process.

While we're waiting for the laser cutting to arrive in, we get all the letter bars and fixings welded for the weathervanes, plus any scrolls or hooks are hand forged for the hanging basket brackets and signs if we have any on order, which all saves time once our delivery has turned up. It's usually then 2-4 days in the workshop before all the cutting, bending, grinding and TIG welding is complete, and the batch is ready for electroplating. Being a very industrial process involving a lot of chemicals and strict regulations, it is not something we could consider doing in house, but do feel it is essential in producing work of the quality and durability we would want to buy ourselves. So, given our not at all industrial location, it's a long drive and a full day out for one of us. The batch is then all powdercoated, and anything that's not being painted or gilded is ready for packaging. As all of our products are different sizes, we cannot buy in boxes so each one is made to order, so even the packaging is not that straightforward!

Any house or farm signs that need painting are then with us for another 3 days minimum, as it takes 3 coats to ensure the signwriting will be nice and durable. We then leave it a bit of time to cure before packaging, and the length of time here can vary depending on the weather. Gilding is even longer - this is quite fiddly and we don't cut corners so it usually adds a week onto the whole process.

Every part of the process adds up to it taking around four weeks to produce a weathervane or sign - there's not really any way of doing it to this quality any quicker - not while living anywhere nice anyway!