What are you doing about poor quality dye sub products?

[Ross Moshinsky]

We're frustrated over here trying to figure out how to handle these dye sub projects where the products we receive are of poor quality from our vendors. I'm currently working on a large dye sub acrylic award project. The total order will likely end up being around 250-300 pcs and these are not inexpensive acrylics. My issue is I'm running into a ~35% rejection rate. I've run into the same high rejection rate when working with coated glass. Some boxes of 10 will have a rejection rate of ~10-15% and others are about 50%. To me, that's a very high rejection rate.

Here are the problems we're running into:

Scratches in the coating
Pin holes in the coating
Irregularities in the coating which becomes very visible when sublimated
Little black hairs in the coating
Other "junk" caught in the coating.
Scratches on the actual face/sides
Junk caught floating in the acrylic


We've lowered our standards and allowed minor imperfections but when you see a 1/4" black hair in the middle of someone's name, how do you just say "it is what it is"? Instead of this being a straight production job, we're sitting here evaluating every piece very closely as it's very easy to miss one of the issues and then press it and magically it's incredibly obvious. It's an incredible waste of time and energy. What bugs me most is they (overseas manufacturers) can make piano finish plaques with 20 coats of lacquer with no hairs but on these stupid acrylics ~50% have a little black hair in there somewhere.

So what are you doing to deal with poor quality merchandise from your vendors?

[Keith Winter]

Where are you buying from Ross? Are you direct importing? Ive bought from from jds Conde best blanks all of them. Defective rate is around 5% manufacturer error + 5-8% our error.


We're frustrated over here trying to figure out how to handle these dye sub projects where the products we receive are of poor quality from our vendors. I'm currently working on a large dye sub acrylic award project. The total order will likely end up being around 250-300 pcs and these are not inexpensive acrylics. My issue is I'm running into a ~35% rejection rate. I've run into the same high rejection rate when working with coated glass. Some boxes of 10 will have a rejection rate of ~10-15% and others are about 50%. To me, that's a very high rejection rate.

Here are the problems we're running into:

Scratches in the coating
Pin holes in the coating
Irregularities in the coating which becomes very visible when sublimated
Little black hairs in the coating
Other "junk" caught in the coating.
Scratches on the actual face/sides
Junk caught floating in the acrylic


We've lowered our standards and allowed minor imperfections but when you see a 1/4" black hair in the middle of someone's name, how do you just say "it is what it is"? Instead of this being a straight production job, we're sitting here evaluating every piece very closely as it's very easy to miss one of the issues and then press it and magically it's incredibly obvious. It's an incredible waste of time and energy. What bugs me most is they (overseas manufacturers) can make piano finish plaques with 20 coats of lacquer with no hairs but on these stupid acrylics ~50% have a little black hair in there somewhere.

So what are you doing to deal with poor quality merchandise from your vendors?

[Ross Moshinsky]

JDS is who I normally deal with. I've found the metal and wood products to be fine. Same amount of problems as anything else made in China. The glass and acrylic have QC issues. Way too many imperfections in the coating. I purchased some acrylics from Marco and their product was completely defective.

I can see why people are moving more and more to direct to sub printing.