Frequently Asked Questions

Sheet steel, cut to the shape of the design and then powder coated. The coating is baked on rather than sprayed, which is why it takes a knock without chipping the way paint does.

The cut is the design. There is no backing board and no printed panel, so the wall shows through wherever the artwork has a gap in it, and the shadow the sign throws is part of how it reads.

No. What arrives is the steel face, cut to the design and drilled at the center for the shaft. You supply the movement and the hands.

A standard shaft movement costs a few dollars from any hardware or craft store and fits with a nut on the front. Measure the thickness of the steel and the depth you want the hands to sit at before you buy one, because shafts come in several lengths and the short ones do not reach through a thick wall fixing.

Three forms, and you choose one on the product page.

• The plural, as in The Adamses. This is the one most people picture.
• The bare surname on its own, as in Adams.
• The surname followed by Family, as in Adams Family.

Because that is the English family plural for a name ending in s, x, z, ch or sh. Jones becomes Joneses and Marsh becomes Marshes, the same way one Jones family is the Joneses at Christmas.

It looks wrong to some people the first time they see it cut into steel. If you would rather it did not, choose the bare surname or the Family wording instead, which is why all three exist.

Circle, oval, square and rectangle, and the right one is usually decided by the wall rather than by the sign. A round sign wants space around it and suits a fireplace wall or a porch. A rectangle sits better over a door or in the run of a hallway.

A long surname reads better across a rectangle or an oval than squeezed into a circle. That is worth more than any rule about which shape looks best.

Across the longest side. A shape wider than it is tall is measured across, so a 24 inch oval is 24 inches wide and less than that tall.

Hold a tape against the wall before you order rather than after. Steel at 36 inches is a piece of furniture and it will not look the way a photograph of it looked.

Close, and never exactly. A powder coat is a baked physical surface with its own sheen, and a monitor renders it as flat color under one lighting condition. Choose by name rather than by holding a paint chart to the screen.

Black and silver behave most predictably indoors. Copper reads warm and almost pink under a filament bulb and much browner in daylight, so put it where you can see it change.

Send it to us. New names go into the range in batches, and the ones people write in about go to the front of the queue ahead of anything picked off a census table.

Ask for a surname

Allow 5 to 11 business days from order to doorstep. Checkout shows you the same window before you pay.

The first part is the workshop: cut, coated, cured and packed, none of which starts before you order. The second is ground freight, and a heavy rigid parcel is not something a carrier hurries.

Shipping

The continental United States, and nowhere else. We cannot ship to Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico or Guam.

That is a limit our fulfillment partner sets rather than a market we chose. There is no price at which they will send steel of this size outside the lower 48, so checkout stops the order before you pay rather than taking money for something that cannot be made and sent.

Three weeks, and more than that through December. A sign is cut, coated, cured and then trucked, and each of those is a queue rather than a machine you can jump.

A receipt lands when you pay. Tracking follows when the sign is packed and collected. Freight scans less often than parcel post does, so expect longer gaps between updates than a small package would give you.

Email us within 30 days of delivery with your order reference and a photo. We cut a replacement and freight it free, and the first sign stays with you.

Return postage on a 36 inch steel sign costs more than making a second one, which is why nothing here asks you to send anything back.

Returns and refunds

Only before the cutter runs, so send us a message the same hour. Steel cannot be un-cut, a shorter name will not fit the hole a longer one left, and a sign carrying one family name has exactly one household it suits.

Steel left in standing water or full weather will eventually mark whatever the coating, and that is not a fault we can remake for. It is the same sentence on /returns/ and /terms/, word for word, on purpose.

A coating that lifts or blisters on a sign hung indoors or under cover is a fault, and we replace it.

What is not a fault

Use a fixing rated for the weight and for your wall. Plasterboard, brick and timber each want something different, and a large sign is heavy enough that the difference matters.

Hanging is the one part of this we cannot do for you and cannot be liable for, so it is worth ten minutes in a hardware store rather than the picture hook already in the drawer.

Under cover, yes. A porch, a veranda or a sheltered wall is what these are made for outdoors.

Full weather is a different question. Powder coat is tough and it is not a marine finish, so a sign facing driving rain or sitting where water pools will mark in time.

A dry cloth, or a damp one and then a dry one. Nothing abrasive, no scouring pad and no solvent. The coating is baked on and hard, and a wire brush will still get through it.