San Antonio Spurs Tap Florida Sign Company for Massive Project

FOR THIS MONTH, I’m writing my column 32,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, wedged in middle seat 3E, between a lady who won’t stop complaining about how much she paid for her ticket, and a guy who is way too tall to get the window seat. But $25 later, I’m enjoying a Bacardi & Coke and Rick is across the way with a Jack & Ginger…

Just look at Rick, all cocky over there in an aisle seat reading his Kindle, legs stretched out, flight attendants tripping over his big-ass feet. And here I am sitting over here on a milk crate, working. JT, our newest project manager, is a couple of rows back, but I don’t know what he’s doing.

However, I do know that all three of us are on the way to San Antonio to meet the owners of our new client, the San Antonio Spurs! Yep, that’s right — the N-B-freakin’-A Spurs. They’re building a massive new performance center, and we will be doing all the signage!

Although a thousand miles from our Orlando base, this project is a perfect fit for us: Three large exterior building signs consisting of a 6-ft.-tall x 94-ft.-long channel letter set on the rooftop, a 20-ft.-tall x 16-ft.-wide Spurs logo, and a 7-ft.-tall x 30-ft.-long cabinet sign featuring 1-in.-thick push-through acrylic lettering as wall signs.

The rooftop sign will be constructed in five individual sections of letters, each approximately 20 ft. long, bound together by three horizontal U-channel rails. The GC will be building a massive steel framework on top of the roof, with the plan for us to lift our sections 60 ft. in the air and set them onto the steel stringers, nice and easy-like. The Spurs logo, although giant, will be a fairly standard 3-in.-deep, non-lit, fabricated channel letter, flush-mounted to the side of the building. The cabinet sign will sit below the Spurs logo, internally illuminated by HanleyLED PhoenixNRG P-2 modules in 4000 Kelvin, as the client wants a “neutral” color spectrum. Sounds pretty standard, right? But the logo and cabinet sign present some challenges that are anything but a layup.

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Diagram of the steel brackets (below) and a pallet of finished brackets (above) ready to ship to San Antonio.

First, the client insists the push-through cabinet sign matches the depth of the Spurs logo directly above it, 3 in. So, a 7 x 30-ft. cabinet only 3 in. deep — and backlit? Challenging, though we can figure that out. But they also want the cabinet face in one piece… No hinge frame, no seams (and no way to service it) definitely make it more difficult! Oh, and the Spurs logo and the cabinet sign will not sit flush on the wall, which here is merely a custom brick veneer built 10 in. of open space away from the actual, solid CMU block wall that we need to attach to.

So, the signs will look flush to the veneer, when in reality, they’ll be mounted to 28 custom-built, 25-lb. steel brackets. Their job? To float hundreds of pounds of fabricated metal 10 in. off the structural wall. The brackets are already fabricated, coated in Ospho 605 Metal Treatment (rust inhibitor), finished in gray Matthews epoxy primer, and shipped to the job site. Tomorrow, with the help of our friends at Southwest Texas Sign Service (San Antonio), we’ll mount the 28 steel brackets to the CMU wall before the veneer gets installed.

But today, we down rum and whiskey! We have yet to talk about the hundreds of interior signs we have to complete as well. How do we keep getting ourselves into projects like these? Stay tuned, sign brothers and sisters. This one is going right down to the final buzzer!

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