Working with hoarding fixings every day also means noticing little details when we see ACM graphic panels and hoarding installations out in the real world. A few we've seen recently shook our heads. These hoarding panels had been fixed with plain zinc screws, and the heads were then covered with printed vinyl circle stickers to hide them. It’s a quick fix to get a hoarding past client sign-off, and it looks fine on day one.
The problem is what happens on day seven, and every day after.
1. It looks terrible
A hoarding is the face of the development behind it. It’s what the public, the client, the neighbours and the planners see for months, sometimes years. Vinyl caps catch the light, trap dirt and show the shape of the screw head underneath, so what should be a clean, uniform panel ends up looking like it’s covered in bubbles.
2. They fail
Vinyl caps are stickers, and stickers don’t last outdoors. They come as printed dots on a backing roll, and once they’re on a hoarding they face weather, UV, temperature swings and the odd pressure wash.
Caps lift at the edges, shrink, curl and fall off completely. When they go, they leave a hoarding that looks worse than if nobody had tried to hide the fixings at all: missing caps, peeling edges and bare zinc screw heads left exposed to the weather.
3. They weaken the panel
To get a vinyl cap anywhere near flush, you need to countersink the screw into the panel. On ACM (aluminium composite) panels, that means removing material from the very part of the panel the screw relies on to hold. And once the cap lets go, you’re left with a rough, damaged hole and a screw head with nothing protecting it.
4. They weaken the fixing itself
Countersinking doesn’t just affect how the panel looks. Taking material out around the fixing point reduces the integrity of the fixing, which matters on a hoarding that has to stand up to wind loading for the full length of a project.
5. It adds work on site
A vinyl cap isn’t one job, it’s four. For every fixing, the installer has to drill the hole, countersink it so the head can sit down, drive the screw, then peel and stick a cap over the top. Multiply that by every fixing on every panel in a hoarding run and it’s a lot of labour spent on a finish that won’t last.
2. Countersink it
3. Drive the screw
4. Stick on the cap
Done. No countersinking, no sticker, nothing to go back and replace.
There’s a better way.
PanelPro screws are powder-coated and colour-matched to your panel, so there’s nothing to hide in the first place.
The screw is the finish. There’s no sticker to peel and nothing to replace in a month, so the hoarding looks the same in month twelve as it did on day one.
Specifying or installing hoarding?
If you’re installing, specifying or signing off hoarding, ask what’s being used to fix it. A colour-matched screw costs very little compared with the time spent countersinking and capping every fixing, and with the cost of a hoarding that looks bodged for the rest of the project.