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Dale Salamacha

Painted Helmets Coordinate Crew With Chopper

A straightforward but high-flying project.

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Helmets for the sheriff’s office helicopter crew awesomely painted to match their chopper (see photo below).

Scan the QR code — or CLICK HERE — and come along for the ride! “And no, Rick!” Dale says. “You cannot jump out of the helicopter! What the hell is wrong with you?”

OVER THE LAST 40 YEARS, we have moved our signshop from one location to the next, to the next, and so on… moving to larger facilities each time as we grew the business. As our business model matured, we realized that we didn’t want anything to do with a “storefront” shop, or one that was on a main roadway with high visibility.

Although intuitively, one would think that’s exactly what a business needs — for customers to see them, right? But we eventually realized we were interested in building large-scale projects and not installing racing stripes on a Mustang (although we still do that). And tons of people would come in to ask if we did banners, and while yes, we did, it wasn’t the work we looked for. Hence, for the past 20 years we have made a point to move only to shops off the beaten path, in an industrial park, on side streets, etc.

Buying our new building a few years back, it checked every box we wanted. Very close to an expressway, but not next to Trader Joe’s. The point is, we didn’t get walk-in traffic — until last month. Apparently, one Lt. Steve Farris rides his bicycle past our shop every weekend, saw our sign and thought we may be able to help with a unique project.

Lt. Farris runs the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) Helicopter Response Team. Throughout our county, these guys perform search and rescue missions, help with wildfire control and track bad guys with some insane camera technology.

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You can’t get into a ride like this…

But why do they need help from a signshop? Well, the SCSO are the proud new owners of a brand new, badass, $6 million helicopter, fully equipped with the very latest in high-end tech. Okay cool, but again why do they need Media 1?

Well, their old helicopter featured standard printed-and-die-cut reflective SCSO graphics on a bright white background. But the new copter was custom painted a very cool (close to) Aston Martin metallic green and black with a gold stripe. Beautiful paintwork on an amazing helicopter. And nope, they didn’t want us to put new vinyl graphics on it. They actually didn’t want us to touch the bird at all. We were there for a much more important reason. The helicopter team of 15 pilot and co-pilot officers still had white helmets. What?!

… wearing a helmet like this!

You absolutely cannot fly a custom-painted helicopter into battle with non-matching helmets! I mean, what kind of self-respecting law enforcement officer would do that?

Right… none. And Lt. Farris wasn’t about to have his crew subjected to that kind of embarrassment!

That Monday, Steve stopped by and spoke to our Art Director Jason Wissig, asking if we could perform such a task. Jason assured him that we absolutely could and asked for the details. A few days later the Lieutenant came back with a helmet to inspect and excited to tell us he had been binge-watching our YouTube episodes! He asked if we could do an episode highlighting the Sheriff’s Office, their new helicopter and the process of transforming these plain white helmets into high-flying works of art, worthy of their new aircraft.

Our answer: Hell yeah! …But only if you take Rick and me on a flight! They readily agreed, and we were off!

The process…

Oh no! I’m near my word-count limit. Mark Kissling says I can only have 600! Guess I can’t tell you any more… Sorry!

Good thing we filmed the entire project! Scan the code above or click here!

PHOTO GALLERY (3 IMAGES)

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