Signs could be saviours for Shelburne business

By Greg Bennett

The Coast Guard

NovaNewsNow.com

Describing the last 16 months as a “horror show” for his manufacturing business, Terry Hawkins says he can see a big light at the end of the tunnel.

And, it is in signs that the company founder of Terry Hawkins Industries sees the future.

With aluminum prices soaring, he says his flat-panel fiberglas road signs are being coveted by several Canadian sign manufacturers with the potential for $13-million in annual sales.

The largest hurdle was 12 months of exhaustive testing of the signs for the provincial Department of Transportation. The province approved the THI sign-panel for tender and in April issued a purchase order for sign-panel blanks from the company.

Hawkins believes the new technology will eliminate the need for aluminum sign panels and could mean as many as 23 additional jobs for the area.

The sign-panels are created using a manufacturing process developed by the Shelburne company which is now the subject of a Patent Application with the Canadian Intellectual properties Office.

Hawkins says the company has not been immune from the sub-prime crisis in the US, exerting further pressure on our business and all but dried up the gains the company made in 2006.

During the last 12 months Hawkins says many of the crew were not paid on time, some are owed money still now, but he says many kept coming in because they knew, at the end of the day, they were building something.

“Something they will own a piece of,” he says.

Prior to incorporation, Hawkins was carrying on a business building Acadian style cottages clad with stucco-look paneling and wood shake-look roofing tiles. With a target market of 250,000 Acadians expected to visit Nova Scotia over 2004 and 2005, there were big hopes.

Less than 5,000 Acadians visited.

No Acadian cottages were sold, although several Acadian style buildings were converted and sold as stucco sided Japanese Mink-In houses, emergency housing in Louisiana, and hurricane proof buildings in the province. One was sold as an Acadian Country Store to Jackson Lore for his U-Pick Strawberry operation in Upper Clyde.

In 2006, Hawkins acquired a large pultrusion machine the only such machine large enough to make FRP sign-panels and sign-posts in Canada, east of Quebec, says Hawkins.

Last year the company submitted its first sign-blanks to the Province of Nova Scotia for evaluation. The evaluation period lasted over 10 months where strength, durability, collision safety and other factors were tested and reviewed and the successful completion of the sign panel tests resulted in an immediate emergency order being placed by the province to backfill signs, stolen or vandalized for their metal value.

The first short production run has been delivered and are being installed on roads and highways in Nova Scotia. Hawkins says feedback has been extremely positive.

“Everyone wants the product,” says Hawkins.

The company is now also submitting fiberglas resin signposts for evaluation by the province. Hawkins hopes those tests, if successful, will see traditional galvanized steel posts replaced by the new technology.