Another beautiful sign completely rebuilt by Optimum Signs. When we received the call from TCI, they were looking to fix up their existing sign. The face had cracks in the print, the fluorescent lights were dim and required constant maintenance and the address was not lit so truck drivers couldn’t find the place after dark. Sounds like an opportunity to shine! Sorry, I had to do that.
We started with a simple site survey and that kind of opened out eyes. The maintenance people cut a piece of wood and drilled it into the face of the sign because the print looked that bad. Plus, the company had just gone through a rebranding and the sign no longer cut the mustard. We removed the wood to see what we had on the inside of the sign and imagine our surprise when we realized that the internal components were in rough shape.
We brought the sign back to our shop to start working on this. Our scope of work was pretty simple: new face with updated print, remove fluorescent lights and install LED’s, sand, prime and paint exterior and cut windows into the lower frame and install acrylic over additional LED’s to light the address below.
Starting with the face we use polycarbonate only as that is the correct material for any sign face as it will not shrink, crack or peel. It is made for this exact application. We found as with most custom shaped signs, the oval isn’t an exact oval. We had to place the existing face on top of a new piece of polycarb and run the CNC around the old face. Once it was cut, we sized and printed the new design. Because the background is black, and the sign lights up, we used a utility grade vinyl for the background while everything else is printed on translucent vinyl. The background lights up without turning grey. It looks great.
Stripping the old electronics out of the sign was pretty easy. Installing the new LED’s had a bit of a challenge as the internal supports for the sign ran through the center of the sign, right where we need the LEDs to be brightest. As soon as we started cutting the windows into the bottom of the sign, we realized that we were going to have to get creative. We worked around the supports that ran from the back of the sign to the front of the sign. We cut in 5 windows, each with it’s own set of LED’s.
Overall, start to finish, took us a little over 30 days to completely refurbish this sign. So if you have a light box that you would love to have refurbished, or maybe even have the fluorescent lights changed out, please give us a call. We can be reached at 262.289.9481 or email us at info@optimumsignswi.com. We would love to help you.
