Numerous restaurants closed their doors during the Great Recession, and far more had to cut staff and simplify menus to meet payroll requirements and keep their doors open. Now, as the country leaves the downturn in the rearview mirror, more restaurateurs are investing in quality signage. Coba Cocina Inc., which operates a namesake Mexican restaurant in Lexington, KY, invested in a sign that transcends its role and stands as an architectural statement.
Snyder Signs (Johnson City, TN) built the sign and its complementary features. The sign incorporates an aluminum skin-covered, steel framework, featuring hammered copper treated with a process that prevents oxidation.
The shop’s fabricators pretreated the copper, coating with an acrylic-polyurethane clearcoat. To illuminate the sign, Snyder constructed a ¾-in.-thick acrylic layer that’s shaped with a MultiCam 3000 CNC router; LED perimeter lighting simulates neon’s effect.
Coba Cocina also tasked Snyder with constructing a working, multi-tiered fountain. Moreover, the client specified that the fountain’s top tier eject water in seamless sheets. Snyder produced mock-ups in its plant and experimented with the edge until it developed a radius design that produced a suitable waterfall. Snyder produced the fountain’s tier by constructing 1/8-in.-thick aluminum with waterproof continuous welding seams covered with proprietary coatings commonly used by fountain builders. Snyder Signs also fabricated the stone work and installed the system’s water pump and hoses (the pumps’ access points were installed into the lowest tier to facilitate future service). The shop began the coating process with an acrylic-polyurethane clearcoat, then created a textured finish with Akzo Nobel coatings.