Small Signshop, Big Fabrication

“BIG THINGS HAVE small beginnings,” from the tiny acorn to the mighty oak and more. The statement is no less true when applied to big sign projects fabricated by small signshops.

SO MANY SIGNS: These merely hint at the scope of Branded Sign Solutions’ project.

Pumped Up

Branded Sign Solutions (East Helena, MT) has eight non-office employees working in a 3,000-sq.-ft. space, says company president Earl Charles. Recently, the shop took on a very big project for local long-time customer Town Pump, providing signage for their complex and sprawling, predominantly one-story building that includes a gas station, convenience shop, liquor store and casino.

Let’s start with the 29 wall signs for the building: 14 feature aluminum faces routed out by the shop’s Industrial CNC for push-through copy. SloanLED ColorLINE tubing from Principal Industries totaling 1,400 linear ft. was installed on the outside bordering two sides and the bottom. Twelve of the cabinets were not rectangular, instead having ends with a 15-degree angle. The other 15 signs were custom-shaped cabinets with polycarbonate faces and color-white-color (layered) printed graphics, Charles says.

Now onto the bigger stuff: One double-faced, single-pole 60-ft. pylon sign features an 8 ft., 8 in. x 16-ft. Exxon sign and Sunshine Electrical Displays two-color 60-in. price digits — both provided by the customer. Branded Sign Solutions fabricated the 6 ft., 8 in. x 16-ft. “Town Pump Food Stores” cabinet with flex faces and 30-in. base pipe.

Another pylon, also double-faced, but this one involving a double-pole, a 40-ft. structure fabricated from 12-in. square tubing, includes a customer-provided 6 ft. x 11 ft. 3-in. Exxon sign. Branded built three signs listing the convenience shop, liquor store and gas-diesel choices: 4 ft. x 11 ft. 3-in., 6 ft. x 11 ft. 3-in. and a 7 ft. x 11 ft. 3-in. They also fabricated a 5 x 10-ft. fuel-price sign using Sunshine 24-in. digits. At the bottom they installed a 5 ft. x 10 ft. x 10mm Daktronics EMC.

All signs were installed as well as fabricated by Branded Sign’s crew of eight, the entire project taking six months. “Our biggest challenge was having all the signs completed and finding places to keep the finished cabinets while having enough room to still fabricate in our 3,000-sq.-ft plant,” Charles says.

Since the completion of this project, Branded Sign Solutions has added three directional signs, another wall sign on the building over a back entrance, three sets of channel letters inside and some RV-dump signs. “We have done quite a few others for this customer,” Charles says, “but this one was the largest to date.”

MATERIALLY CHANGED: It’s A Good Sign branched out from their usual for this illuminated timeline.

A Long Timeline

A monthly coffee event hosted by the Greater East Dallas Chamber of Commerce led to It’s A Good Sign (Dallas) creating a timeline wall installation for local White Rock Montessori. “This was a big job because it involved a lot of design work on the front end, working alongside the client to identify the best photography in their files for the overall piece,” says Gayle Goodman Lynch, co-owner of It’s A Good Sign. “50 years of history distilled into a single line on the wall took a lot of thought on our client’s part, working along with her leadership team and other people with a vested interest in the school.”

The shop partnered with The Sign Pack (Thonotosassa, FL) for the design, as they often do for large projects. Regarding fabrication, It’s A Good Sign has focused mostly on printed jobs since opening in 2024. “This was definitely more of a ‘fabrication’ job that involved panel sawing, skill sawing, and trimming and polishing to get a really clean look all the way around the various pieces of acrylic,” Goodman Lynch says.

The shop used their EFI H1625 LED to image the acrylic. They also printed 3M IJ35C vinyl by way of their 64-in. HP Latex 700, then protected it with Briteline 3mil UV overlaminate applied by their GFP 463TH laminator. They installed 1-in. brushed-aluminum standoffs, a 120V, 20-amp dedicated circuit and three 24V LED drivers to power LED light strips installed on the sign. “The first strips we attempted to use could not handle the load for the wall, so we had to pivot and order a different kind,” Goodman Lynch says.

A hired electrician encountered a firewall unseen during the site visit prior to the installation, which prevented the team from wiring down to the timeline as originally planned. After dropping the wires above and below the firewall, they took down the entire assembly to re-wire in their shop, then re-install. However, while loading the acrylic panels into their truck, wind caught one large piece, blowing it across the parking lot and scratching it up, requiring a replacement.

The team had not installed such large pieces of acrylic in an older building before and realized quickly that because old walls sag, mounting the acrylic so that it married up from piece to piece took a great deal of patience and skill. “In hindsight, we could have perhaps corrected for this with a backer, but we hadn’t designed the installation that way in order to wire it the way we wanted to,” Goodman Lynch says, “so we worked with what we had and did some onsite adjusting to shave down parts of the acrylic to make the edges clean where things weren’t plumb.”

In all the installation planned for three days ended up going over a week, but ultimately the shop’s team of two owners (husband and wife), one full-time signmaker, one part-time shop assistant and one contract installer, together with a pair of hired electricians, came through with a timeline that reflects the school’s journey, celebrating 50-plus years of excellence.

PHOTO GALLERY (15 IMAGES)