Making a zinging sign

We were asked by our friends at Imagineerium to build two signs for there client Drty to be able to use at festivals. The main sign was to be an american diner style sign to go on top of a structure at El Dorado festival. The other sign was just a smaller lightbox which could be used wherever they wanted a bit of extra branding.

Image from the El Dorado website

Imagineerium are an amazing creative design agency who we work with on many projects. They have great designers and project managers, which means when they ask us to build something for them we’re always excited to see what its going to be. There were a couple of initial design ideas for the main sign and we gave a rough quote for each to help the clients decide which one they wanted.

The initial SketchUp done by Channon at imagineerium

The design chosen by the client had quite a few interesting elements to think about making it an interesting job for us. We had two main light boxes one with a pink light and one with a white light, We also had a triangle with a white neon style light. These would all need to be mounted on some sort of frame which in turn would be installed on top of the set around 4 meters high. The sign would also need to be resistant to the weather and be easily stored and re assembled for use at different events.

We started by building the two light boxes. We CNC cut the fronts and assembled the signs using birch plywood and opal acrylic, The 5mm opal acrylic allows the perfect amount of light transmittance for a light box. We then filled and sanded the signs ready for priming.

After everything had been primed white (including the inside), filled and sanded, we installed some timber sections inside the signs and added t-nuts to allow us to easily bolt the sign to a frame later.

LED modules time! we used LED modules evenly spaced to get a good spread of light, we drew a simple grid in pencil to make this easier. We used heat shrink water proof wire connectors which are often used for auto electronics to make sure that even if some rain did get into the sign it wouldn’t matter. We used RGB LED modules so that we could get the pink colour that the client wanted, it also meant that if they wanted a different colour that was possible too. The lightboxes operated on a 12 volt system and we installed a control unit so that when the sign was up high you could operate the signs using a remote.

To make the triangular part we cnc cut 3 strips of ply with the groove in the middle. i then used these strips to make the front of the triangle and boxed it out to give it more depth. The groove was so we could slot the 8mm cool white neon flex straight into the wood, this is the best way to create intricate shapes using neon flex as it means you can CNC cut the groove exactly to the design you want. Then the neon flex was cut to the right length. We then filled sanded and marked anything that we didn’t want to paint. To paint the light boxes and triangle we did 3 coats sprayed with a hard wearing acrylic paint. While waiting for the paint to dry we worked on the frame.

The frame was designed so that each sign can be easily bolted on or off and used on there own if needed. We used 20mm box steel welded and attached scaffold fittings so that the sign could be mounted to two upright scaffolding tubes.

Once the signs were bolted on and the LEDs tested it was ready to be installed at the festival.

On site we put in the scaffold that would hold the sign to the existing structure we then lifted the sign as one piece using a telehandler into the right position. We then used ropes to climb up and make secure it using the scaffold clips that were on the sign. We were really happy with the way it turned out! Hopefully the clients liked it too!

Thanks for reading guys send us a message if you want a sweet sign for your brand! X