I thought an update in order. You’d think something like a paper shingle would be easy, after all we have been offering them for the last 9 years, but if your going to commit to creating something and package it up and offer to folks it damn well better be good. So what’s happining, what happenned?
A month ago, I thought I was done and awaiting bids on laser cutting. How much could it be? Its just paper.
Well it was ALOT, too much. I had to seriously re think things, so it stalled. Interestingly the solution came in a dream. I literally visualized a new arrangement of the art that would cut the cutting time in half. Of course I had to redo a lot of the art and as long as I was doing that, why not freshen up all of the art. So I did. I finished it last week and set out to get fresh bids on the cutting. Those bids are now coming in and the numbers are much better.
Another thing happened. It’s no secret that we want to create a shingle that would replace the now long gone Paper Creek shingle. You hear stories about secret cashe here and there but I know that I personally haven’t seen them for years. Well Big bro comes over with a surprise, a half dozen packages of unopened PC product, including one sheet of shingles. He wouldn’t tell me what he paid for them but the revelations were worth it. First and formost was that the rusty corrigated sheets and the ragged tar paper were NOT laser cut. Just a printed sheet on 30LB paper.
The legendary and lemented Shingles were rather low resolution black ink on medium brown paper. Too dark in my opinion (you can always make something darker but you can’t make them lighter).
Our shingle and roofing material set is at least 100% sharper and more detailed. (I might need to run that claim by the lawyers) but lets just say I was stunned.
It’s funny, not having the real thing in hand pushed us to create something of unquestionable high quality (I don’t believe for a minute that there will not still be nay-sayers. Some folks are just wired that way)
We are still a couple of weeks away from being able to ship but I feel confident that we are going to be offering the best shingle possible.