Message-Center Monument Helps Sweetwater Provide Sweet Sound

Scott Gray is owner of Graycraft Signs (Warsaw, IN).

Graycraft Signs has worked closely for several years with Sweetwater Sound, Inc. in Fort Wayne, IN on various sign projects. Mike Ross, Sweetwater’s VP of marketing, wanted an iconic sign – a real eye-popper, like the giant bunny that identifies the Nestlé USA headquarters in Anderson, IN – to serve as a gateway to the city of Fort Wayne on US Hwy 30. Ross wanted the sign to effectively communicate corporate and community events on a large scale.

About the client
Sweetwater Sound opened 35 years ago in Fort Wayne, and it’s become the country’s most respected dealer of high-tech equipment for musicians, recording studios and broadcasters. It sells microphones and digital-recording systems for such instruments as electric guitars and electronic drums. Sweetwater’s customers range from novices to superstars.
The company’s equipment can be found in Los Angeles, New York and Nashville recording studios, and in TV and radio stations nationwide, as well as in tens of thousands of home-based recording studios. Sweetwater is built on a commitment to providing the highest level of customer service in the music-technology industry.

The right design
Developing the iconic Sweetwater sign turned into a grueling, three-year process. Why so long? Graycraft conducted numerous drive-bys, fly-bys and computer mock-ups to cultivate a final design, but these concepts ultimately created an impasse. One of Scott’s original concepts included a 60-ft.-tall guitar.
It looked like the project might reach a dead end. However, the project’s discussion convinced Graycraft a supersized, dynamic-digital sign (DS) would provide an effective marketing tool and information source. I drew a sketch on paper of a triangular DS display to be built at an intersection off U.S. Hwy 30. After three years of hard work and setbacks, Sweetwater’s team saw this newest concept, and said, “That’s it.” Ironically, with the proliferation of modern, sign-design software, a sketch rendered by hand sold the job.
Sweetwater created a firm deadline: the sign had to be completed in time for June’s GearFest, Sweetwater’s in-house, music-equipment expo – the largest in the U.S. that’s open to the public. This left us less than three months to execute the job.

Construction commences
Graycraft Signs selected Watchfire Signs (Danville, IL) to produce the sign’s DS components with two, 12mm-pixel EMCs. Each display measures 15 ft. 6 in. high x 28 ft. wide, and weighs 7,500 lbs. The overall structure size is 26 ft. high x 35 ft. wide. I’d reviewed message centers from several vendors over the years, and was confident in making this recommendation to Sweetwater. Chuck Surack, Sweetwater’s CEO, flew several members of his team and me to Danville, IL on his company’s plane to tour the facility and review the display and software, and was immediately convinced.
We worked closely with Dave Wuellner, Watchfire’s sales manager for the Midwest region. We also hired Corporate Construction (Auburn, IN), owned by Doug Hofer, to join the project team. They built the sign’s foundation, steel and masonry. They’d built Sweetwater’s original building, so a solid relationship already existed.
People in the Midwest and Northeast know the winter of 2013-2014 was long and brutal. Days with negative-degree wind chills stretched well into March. It seemed this sign might never get constructed.
Excavating the site and laying the sign’s foundation took Corporate Construction a week and a half; Graycraft Signs supervised the job. One major hurdle included removing an old sign base before starting on the new sign foundation.
The sign base, which once supported an old North American Van Lines sign, had been installed approximately 30 years ago. Removing the old sign base added a day and a half to the project – and $6,000 to the budget.
We hoped to use part of the old foundation from the existing Sweetwater sign, which was only six years old. We couldn’t; the whole sign structure had to be moved back because the old foundation ran into an underground power line that couldn’t be relocated. Building the steel structure and metal framing took roughly three weeks. This process moved smoothly, thanks to excellent steel-construction engineering provided by the local firm MSKTD.
To identify the property and complement the supersized display, Graycraft Signs produced 4-ft.-tall channel letters, which comprise hand-fabricated aluminum forms and acrylic faces, and are halo-lit with SloanLED white modules.

Of wire and stone
Next, Corporate Construction built the sign’s sandstone base, which hit a rough patch because the quarry in upstate New York, which we contracted to provide the rocks, was still frozen because of the extended winter temperatures. Thankfully, a solution existed onsite. Concurrently, Sweetwater was completing a 130,000-sq.-ft. addition to its facility. The construction crew had leftover sandstone from that job, and we incorporated the remnants into building the sign’s base. Without it, the sign would’ve been four to six weeks late and ruined their GearFest timeframe. As you can imagine, GearFest is the company’s largest annual sales function.
Watchfire and Graycraft’s installation of the DS display required two and a half days; ongoing wind and rain provided an obstacle. However, we pressed on and worked for 13 hours over two full days. We set the message center in place with a Central Crane 40-ton, hydraulic crane. Ford bucket trucks and harnesses, rope grabs and other climbing equipment proved vital to the job.
For the final steps, Graycraft and Corporate Construction completed the construction around the message centers. Digital message centers, especially ones this large, require hundreds of linear feet of high-voltage wiring. The message centers needed to be controlled in-house by Sweetwater’s marketing department. As Corporate Construction and Graycraft completed the secondary wiring, Watchfire loaded its Ignite software on Sweetwater’s in-house controller network.
Once wiring was complete, and the metal siding was wrapped around the message centers, the job was complete, except for having to install the sod around the sign that same night to get ready for a press conference with the Fort Wayne mayor, Allen County commissioners, Surack and all the key sign-team representatives.
On May 27, the largest Watchfire 12mm-pixel digital message center in the country went live, one week ahead of the scheduled deadline, at a cost of $800,000. For more project information and photos, visit www.graycraftsignswarsaw.com/Sweetwater.htm

Advertisement

Fun facts
• Each Watchfire message center is 15 ft. 6 in. high x 28 ft. wide and weighs 7,500 lbs. The overall structure is 26 ft. high x 35 ft. wide.
• The two message centers utilize 1.4 million LEDs.
• The color spectrum is 73.7 quintillion colors.
• If this were a home TV, a 50-in.-diagonal screen would look pretty small; this one exceeds 370 in.

EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS
Cranes: Forty-ton, hydraulic crane, from Central Crane (Hammond, IN), (800) 866-8750 or www.centralcrane.com; Scissor lifts and Lull boom lifts, from JLG (McConnellsburg, PA), (717) 485-5161 or www.jlg.com; and bucket trucks, from such vendors as Wilkie (Oklahoma City), (405) 235-0920 or www.wilkiemfg.com; and earth-movers and excavators, from construction-equipment vendors
EMCs: Two, 15.5 x 28-ft., 12mm-pixel message centers with separate onboard controllers, from Watchfire Signs (Danville, IL), (217) 442-0611 or www.watchfiresigns.com
LEDs: White LED modules, from SloanLED (Ventura, CA), (888) 747-4533 or www.sloanled.com
Structural fabrication: Steel support structure, corrugated-metal siding and a sandstone masonry base, built by Corporate Construction (Auburn, IN), (260) 925-4451
Software: Ignite electronic-display software, from Watchfire Signs