Talk about a balancing act. When we walked the site for the new Anytime Fitness in downtown Milwaukee we noticed that the entire face of the building is made of glass, except for an I-beam that runs the length of the face of the building. This is going to require some creativity.
Glass fronts on buildings are nothing new. We have been installing channel letters to the faces of all kinds of buildings for the past 7 years and this wasn’t going to be anything new. What was new was the structure of the building. This building is a series of I-beams that create the exterior of the building with glass between the I-beams. The only structure that we can attach to are the I-beams. Of course we can’t support the signs using the glass or the frames of the glass so the weight and structural support has to come from the I-beams. OK. We got this.
The format of the channel letters was directed by Anytime Fitness corporate as it is a trademarked design. That saved us a bunch of time. One of the enhancements we make on all of our channel letters is that we use Principal Underwater LED’s. These LED’s are designed to be installed in pools so they are completely water resistant. The connections are specifically designed for underwater use so they are incredibly reliable. They come with 50,000 hour burn life guarantee and we have some of the first signs we put up still going strong after 7 years. The LED’s also provide a very strong white light without being harsh, a very warm glow. So now we have the channel letters built and mounted to the raceways. Our designers decided that we needed an artistic way to hang the channel letters from the I-beam so we turned to our partners in the building trades.
One suggestion was to use pipe hangers that are used to hold conduit to ceilings in structures. The only issue there is that most of those are designed to be embedded in concrete. So our fabricators found a solution that would hold up to 2,000#. The raceways and channel letters only weight about 50# so we were plenty safe. Even when you figure in a 40MPH wind and the weight of the sign, we were well over engineered.
If you happen to have a sign project that needs a creative solution please give Optimum Signs a call. We can be reached at 262.289.9481 or email us at info@optimumsignswi.com.
