Olufson Designs / fabrication & install

Here's the finished sign. This is Sean Olufson's 3rd or so location and he's very glad to be downtown. He had the logo and typeface already established. I took great liberties chopping up, rearranging and scaling the parts to create this design layout. 

The frame that everything attaches to. It is 2" aluminum angle, 1/8" thick. The vertical placement against the front of the marquee was worked out in advance. Then the attaching brackets were designed and determined the odd pattern.

The parts for the logo and letters were cut out on a cnc router. The black 'Alupanel' (a 3/16" pre-painted aluminum sandwiched substrate with a plastic core) drops into and fits perfectly down in the cut out HDU (1.5" high density urethane foam board). I've already rounded over the square corners of the HDU with a 3/4" quarter round bit in the router.

The HDU frame that borders the sign was built up from 2 pieces.

These lengths were milled to the above cross section shape on a tablesaw. I've marked the side where it needs carved out underneath to accommodate the head of the pop rivet. 2, 4' x 8' Alupanel sheets have been cnc router cut to shape and pop riveted to the frame. The Alupanel comes with a protective film which will later come off.

The HDU border is being glued to the aluminum sign frame. While still clamped, it's also receiving stainless screws with locknuts.

Pre-assembly of the top part of the border. The two pieces glued together to make the thickness of the top arch were also cut on the cnc router. I hand routed the inside notch of the top curve with a very scary straight cut router bit. It had 2 1/2" of cutter exposed. I jigged together some assembly of a router table for this operation.

The HDU is adhered to the aluminum with silicone. It's adhered to itself with urethane glue at each new butt joint. Then holes are drilled, countersunk and bolted.

More of the same. It was a long way around this sign.

The underside is notched out to fit over the pop rivet.

Making plugs for the countersunk bolt holes.

I'm using 'Gorilla" brand urethane glue. It looks like honey and is activated by water. It foams up and expands while drying. The plugs had to be clamped or the glue would push them right out.

Flush cutting the excess with a Japanese trim saw.

The cap, or roof is being glued onto the border. If you look closely, you can see a pencil line that marks the edge of my glue area. This much glue will expand to be enough. I'm using HDU that came from a 1 1/2" board in the green color and a 2" board in yellow.

The yellow HDU was glued up from different pieces in the inventory pile.

The roof, or cap, overhangs 1" on 3 sides. Flush on the back.

These small blocks were glued on the backside to trap the Alupanel top arch between the lip of the front. No pop rivets could go along the top of the aluminum frame because they would be visible from the front.

Once all glued, the corners routed off with a 1/4 round bit, and sanded; the HDU gets painted with primer. I even mask the backside to make it look good. Must impress the boss.

Suitable for framing!? .....Maybe if you're a Letterhead. Here's more wallpaper for your desktop.

Here's all the letters ready for multiple coatings. To start, I apply 2 coats of thick, water based, high build primer. It goes on like yogurt, but brushes out fairly smooth. You can then wet sand with fine grit sandpaper to get a very smooth polished finish.

What a great looking shirt.

The backs of the letters are painted with enamel. The ends of the two 2x4's are connected so I can move this entire batch of letters to a different part of the shop to dry.

An appropriate sized brush for the job, a size #28 lettering quill for maximum efficiency. Old school sign shops used real paint; it's so much more fun than vinyl.

Back on the computer, I gave the graphics a 1/10" outline and cut it from this easily removable 'paint mask' vinyl. This one large temporary application tells me where to attach all the letters and the logo. There is a seam right down the middle, between the 2 sheets of black Alupanel. 6 pop rivets there get covered up and hidden with the logo applique.

While my daughter Eliza is home from the U of O, and my brother Scott is visiting, It's a good time to take on a task that requires many hands. We're bolting the logo on. Eliza is amazingly strong and did not let the sign fall. Scott was told "don't dare let the screwdriver touch the gold". His arm was solid as a rock (but his knees were knockin').

This hardware gets covered up with the cutout black Alupanel I showed earlier on.

There is one pop rivet in the center of each half. Both are strategically placed behind a letter. A couple turns by hand with this bit provides enough relief for the rivet head. The vinyl mask is folded over to provide a tab for easy removal. Once the gilded letter is attached, I don't want to scratch it with my fingernail.

The sign is temporarily clamped in place, with a least one bolt on each side. Tim Foley and I are caught telling jokes. Two other friends, Beto Sattel and Dave Anderson, have just left after helping to boost it up in place. Beto is a close friend and neighbor; he helped deliver the sign in his large Isuzu box truck. I was in the back, standing and holding the sign, in the dark with the doors closed, while he drove. Glad my shop is close to downtown.

Tim's working on his half, drilling a hole, fastening a bolt, and pulling a clamp; one connection point at a time.

I'm not working on my half; I'm taking silly pictures instead. The 2 long lengths of angle which are bolted to the marquee were installed the day before. The large lag screws go into 4" wide beams, which have a very random spacing between them. We climbed around up inside an attic space, where the other half of the beams were exposed, and recorded the measurements between them. Then transposed just one mark to the outside that we could measure the rest from. Working blind, we hit each beam with the first pilot hole.

Bridging the right angle brackets to the 2 long parallel lengths are 6 short 8" pieces of the same 2" angle. The angles are reversed to provide a flat point of contact. There's a small amount of adjustability in the height of these. We leveled all 6 on a horizontal plane using a rotating laser.

More short lengths of angle were attached to the sign frame to provide attachment points for the lighting, yet to come.

Major bling!  The gloss black finish becomes a black mirror, adding to the bling factor. One of the first things Sean, the proprietor & boss, notices and points out is the light coming through the gap just above the logo. A piece of black tape on the backside solved the problem and the seam disappeared.

I think all of mankind is attracted to gold.

Oh boy, more signs. I had to add this pic.

The storefront.

The sign at night, after the lights went up. It does a great job of helping light up 1/2 the block.

Jeff Hamann's Mt. Bike

Jeff Hamann has a business called Forest Informatics. He writes brilliant code using algorithms that calculate timber yields given sets of variables. His website is on the rear triangle lower stay opposite the chain. I would think that might make this a tax write-off.

The right side top tube has a pinstripe, turning into saplings, then into medium sized trees, mature trees, stumps, then a skidder dragging away a couple trees, turning back into a pinstripe.

The rear triangle part of the frame had cracked. The replacement came in a different color and maybe even needed a small modification. Jeff made a decision to strip the entire bike and have it powder coated. After my artwork, he wanted a clear coat on top, covering the whole frame.

Here's a logger dude with hardhat, standing on a big ol' stump, leanin' against his big ol' chainsaw, enjoying his pipe. At the bottom is my signature.

We brainstormed these silly concepts with silly cartoon characters. I started hand painting the artwork with a very small lettering quill trimmed down even smaller. I honestly struggled with the smallness. Lettering enamel is wonderful in that you can wipe it off and start over so easily. I borrowed a pair of jewelers magnifying lenses (that you wear like a visor) from my competitor (more like compadre) Sid Beam. They helped immensely.

The 'Tree Amigos' with arms hooked, dancin' a jig. The one on the left holds a bucket, the middle one an ax and the right one a shovel.

We had to work out a few things before starting this project. 1) Was the high temperature of the powder coating oven going to screw with the tempering, or the quality of the aluminum frame. 2) Was the second trip to the oven for the clear powder coat going to burn, discolor, crack, wrinkle or reduce the quality of the lettering enamel in any of a bunch of possible ways. The 1st was answered with a phone call. The 2nd; no idea where to go for this information, we just winged it and had perfect success. Enamel paint, sandwiched between powder coats, baked at 400 degrees. You've seen it here.

The opposite side has a pinstripe, turning into progressively larger trees, to stumps, to a loader and truck, back to a pinstripe.

Adams Art Fundraiser

These 2 stars were done for an auction to raise money for art supplies for the art program at Adams Grade School. Both of my kids went to Adams. A long time & close friend, Donna Jepsen-Minyard, teaches art there. She invited friends within the local art community to create an art piece from plywood stars that she handed out. A fabulous party culminated at Iovino's Ristorante where lots of the bidding took place.

Donna used to work the craft fairs in the western states selling her fine art serigraphs. Since we both screen print, we would often loan equipment and bail each other out with supplies at the last minute. She is also a fabulous calligrapher. We took 2 years of brush calligraphy classes together. I had her do the pointed brush lettering for Grass Roots Bookstore. New Morning Bakery is also her hand brush work.

I took on 2 of these stars and based each theme on love. This one is called 'the 9 Elements of Love'.
From the Bible: love is patient, is kind, does not envy, not boast, not proud, not rude, not self seeking, not easily angered, keeps no records of wrong.

This one: 'All You Need Is Love', has the lyrics to John Lennon's song wrapped around the perimeter.

I took a square on (perpendicular) photo of each star, imported, vectorized and scaled to size on the computer. This gave me a near perfect perimeter path of each star to design with. The designs for these were just pure fun play for me. Each side is a negative of sort of the other. There are 2 screen printed layers on each side, done with gloss enamel ink. Under these prints is a beautiful orange translucent water-based aniline dye on the birch ply, sealed with a couple coats of oil based clear.

There was a sheen difference between the ink and the background clear, so I gave it a top coat of clear for a unified gloss. I kind of rushed this step and should have waited an extra day. The ink started to wrinkle. Oops. Game over. In the can is a cheap brush and old used thinner that I brushed on the surface to soak the coatings for removal. Now the whole layer of clear under the ink has wrinkled.

Yummy; pull out the rubber gloves. It was actually a painless and efficient cleanup. All the goo slipped right off. I backtracked and started over with the base coat of clear, and with a bit more patience. finished with success the next time around.

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.