Downtown Dental

The completed sign at dusk. Dark enough to turn on the lights, but still light enough to see everything else.

This sign is similar to the Mod Pod sign in that the acrylic letters push through the sign face and are illuminated with strips of LED's.

The pop rivets are perfectly spaced and on a perfect arc. My design software has tools to achieve that. All the stainless and green parts were cut out on a cnc laser. I work with Ted Gerhart at Mid Valley Metals in Springfield. I email him the fab files and he ships back to me with a courier that does laps between Florence, Eugene, Corvallis and Newport. The laser just located and pierced the pilot holes for the pop rivets. We still had to drill the holes.

Darren, who shears and brakes at Middleton Heating and Sheet Metal bent the parts where needed. He then used an old school hand cranked crimper to corrugate the inside edges of the sign face. Easier said than done. This put a nice curve into it. Some practice helped us to guess a crude radius setting. Not quite perfect and over crimped in areas, we hammered like hell on the corrugations with big hammers on Tim's steel work table, to get it to open back up.

Tim Foley mitered and welded the aluminum 2" x 2" angle frame. The one odd bracket at the center supports a curved stainless panel that the LED's mount to. This interior panel follows the curve of the front face, but with a shorter radius. There's 2 windows for service panels in the back (left), in case LED's or a power supply ever need to be replaced. The big window at the front (right) gets covered with the green panel. All the stainless is held together and held to the aluminum frame with pop rivets.

Tim is drilling holes for the rivets. With each hole we temporarily place a cleco. They are a spring loaded gizmo with thin retractable fingers which go in the holes. A special plier is used to insert the cleco, then it springs back pinning and tightening the 2 pieces of sheet metal together. Later, we come back and remove the clecos, insert and pop the rivets one by one. Tim helped with most of the assembly of this cabinet.

Pretty much complete, I temporarily powered it up in the shop. It's super bright. My shop gets really dark, whereas downtown always has lots of ambient light. The LED's come from superbrightleds.com.

Looking through the backside service panel.

I stuck my arm under and up inside to take this blind shot. The 2 strips of LED's are flexible, waterproof, and adhered with aggressive double stick tape. The white acrylic letters are cut out on HyTek's cnc router.

The green panel is the same stainless steel, but has been powder-coated. I wanted these rivets to disappear. I custom made these mini paint stencils for a perfect fit. The corner bent over tab makes for easy removal.

1-Shot Lettering Enamel is custom mixed to match. The Q-tip is disposable; I didn't want to clean a brush.

To powder coat the green parts, these nuts were tacked on the back of most of the smaller parts to connect a wire to for conductivity. The particles of powder are charged with a negative charge from the applicator machine. The parts have to hang by a wire from a steel hanging rod attached to an industrial rolling cart. The cart is grounded with a neutral ground causing the electrostatic 'cling'.  The whole cart then gets rolled into a massive oven and baked. Tim Luke kicks ass with a welding torch. He also builds & welds dune buggies; and has a new business for building frames & gear for white water rafts called RecreTec. His powder coat business is Willamette Powder Fab.

The smaller 'blade' sign is 1' x 4'. It's made of 1" aluminum tubes and powder coated to exactly match the overhead marquee. The stainless face is attached with only VHB tape and adhesive goo.

The green 1/8" mild steel logo panel is attached the same way to the stainless. A removable vinyl pattern is used to align the letters. They're attached with silicone.

A secondary part of the Downtown Dental logo was this diagonal design, tiled together to make a nice wallpaper pattern. I broke out this solo segment of the pattern and designed it into the awning to carry the theme throughout the width of the storefront. The green parts above are 1/8" mild steel attached to squares of stainless with 3M's VHB double stick tape. VHB stands for Very High Bond. The stainless squares are attached to the marquee with VHB. I found the thin milky white plastic at a craft store and was able to score it on my vinyl cutter. The missing pieces broke right out with a little wiggling. It was used repeatedly to register the green bits.

Salem Tent & Awning built and installed the marquee. I worked with them to make modifications for my artwork. Each design square is backed by a 12" x 12" x 1/4" aluminum plate, welded to the I beam. There are 3 of these behind the sign. Should the sign and all the stainless ever be removed for a future tenant, the squares are evenly spaced throughout to look good. ST&A also made a hanging support and the framework for the smaller blade sign from my specifications. They were powder coated along with the Marquee. Tim Foley helped me boost the sign up there and bolt it down.