Every year we make awards and plaques for various sporting events around the area. Today we’re making plaques for an annual golf tournament hosted by the American Petroleum Institute. This tournament has 6 flights consisting of a Championship flight, 1st flight, 2nd flight etc… all the way to 5th flight. For each flight there are 12 winners. We are going to make 4 plaques for each place (1st, 2nd, and 3rd). The plaques are made of sublimation aluminum and hardwood cherry that provides the backing.


To start we take the picture supplied by the customer to use as a background for our plaque. In this case it’s a photo of one of the greens on the golf course where they are holding their tournament. Once we adjust the color in the photo so it will show up well on our metal we’re ready to put our text.  This plaque is relatively simple. We have some title text, an API logo, oil derrick, date and placing. Once we have a basic layout we just plug in the different flights and places and we’re ready to print.

We’re going to do these plaques in our heat press so we want it to warm up to 400 degrees. When it’s ready to go we press our metal for 60 seconds. When the buzzer dings the art is on the metal and ready to be set aside to cool off for about 5 minutes. Once the metal is cool enough to handle we make any necessary adjustments like trimming or rounding the edges to finish off our plaque. After the metal is all finished we put a generous amount of double stick tape to the back side and press it to the wooden backing. Rinse and repeat 72 times and the order is ready for pickup.