Stanford Sign & Awning (Chula Vista, CA) has fabricated signage for nearly four decades. The company has grown into an approximately 10,000-sq.-ft. facility and a staff of 80. The full-service, sign- and awning-fabrication shop devotes a large portion of its business to complete design/builds of monument and pylon signs.
San Diego Port Authority officials solicited designs for an illuminated monument sign to identify Point Loma’s Shelter Island, known as the “Hawaiian Isle” in San Diego (it’s not a true island; a narrow strip of land connects it to the mainland). Once only a sandbank visible at low tide, Shelter Island was built up from earth dredged from the bay into a 1.5-mile-long strip of land, and has been a popular tourism and recreation spot for more than 50 years. Stanford Sign & Awning’s design won approval; instead of working through a general contractor or other intermediary, the shop worked directly with the Port Authority, city officials and Shelter Island tenants.
Jim Sindelar, the company’s senior art director, designed the monument sign from scratch using CorelDraw X5 on his PC. To develop the aquatically themed concept, he drew inspiration from his own life experience: before he joined the sign industry, he worked on commercial fishing boats.
Jamie Del Rio, Stanford’s shop foreman and lead sign fabricator (and 35-year employee), directed the building the 25-ft.-tall sign’s trio of sails, waves and channel letters, and its cabinet, from 0.090-in.-thick aluminum with manual fabrication equipment. On the sign’s exterior, fabricators plug-welded components; inside, they MIG-welded pieces to aluminum, square-tube framing. Stanford painted the cabinets with Matthews metallic-silver, acrylic-polyurethane coating.
The “Shelter Island” channel letters were installed atop a perforated-aluminum backplate. The letter backs were welded from flat, cut-out aluminum and painted white with an acrylic-polyurethane coating. The letters’ layers include a layer of 3M light-diffusing film sandwiched between the aluminum and routed, 3/16-in.-thick, clear acrylic. Fabricators decorated the acrylic with 3M’s Dual-Color media, which appears blue under daylight and white when backlit at night.
The lower cabinet, which touts Shelter Island’s amenities, was built with a welded-aluminum background. Fabricators routed the surface on a MultiCam 3000 CNC router, and installed second-surface acrylic that’s coated with Dual-Color vinyl. Below this cabinet, installers situated aluminum waves, which were cut on the MultiCam, and decorated with blue and white Matthews paint.
To shed light on this impressive monument, Sindelar selected blue SloanLED and white Principal LED and Agilight LED cove lighting. He chose cove lighting because of the greater depth and richness the system provided. Blue modules illuminate the sails, and white shines within the cabinets.
Sindelar also designed the handsome monument and water features at the sign’s base. The hardscape features 4 x 4-in., travertine tiles with thin-set mortar and a sealing coat to protect them from corrosion. Within the sign’s water feature, a 2 x 6-ft., mosaic-tile water pattern complements the water that cascades over the upper shelf into the pool below. Waterproof, 25W, halogen lamps installed under the lower water basin embellish the monument. Sindelar also designed the electrical capacitor, which is situated within the main cabinet, and the water pumping and filtration system.
All told, fabricating aluminum components consumed four weeks for two signmakers in the shop, and onsite monument and water-feature production required three weeks for a six-man crew onsite.