Great film. Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know this work was even done this way anymore. I guess like the one painter said, "Blue and yellow make green, but we paint green so it can be richer." Printing will never totally take the place of hand work but my guess is that like many other things over the years the quality will drop a notch or two and become the "new" top-of-the-line once all the painters are gone.
I started before computers so I hand-lettered everything. Have done quite a few wall signs painted on the building. None so high though as the 24'H x 36'W painting of our city's logo on a water tower in town. It was 175 feet tall and I worked in the 150' to the top range.
I remember going to the job site for the first time just to ride up to the top. All I provided was the pattern and the knowledge of how to put the whole job together at that size. A contracting company who painted the entire tower provided the lift and paint which was some special concoction. They also provided me with a helper who was a very experienced painter. He'd never painted a sign before but when the letters are 6' high and no one can get any closer than 150' to it, well, it ain't lettering no more. He already know how to cut instead of just fill-in so that helped a lot.
Someone mentioned going up with no backboard. I refused to do that. We rode up on an aluminum "plank" which was 2' x 12' hoisted by two air powered wenches, (that each of us operated from their own end), that climbed a 1/2" steel cable. We found that one wench was slower than the other so one of us had to stop while the other guy caught up. Many, many times. I told the journeyman who set the job up that I wanted something secured behind me. We wore harnesses that attached to about a 1" dia. rope but that wasn't enough for me. He took a piece of conduit and loosely attached each end of it with some thin rope about 2' high behind us. Everyone of those guys laughed and I didn't find it one bit funny.
Since there was a contractor's painter going up to help me I finally figured that since he was willing I had to be as well. The laugh was on me. What I found is that there is no way in hell you step back for any reason what-so-ever. You are so conscious of where you're at that there is no stepping off by accident.
The hardest part of the ride was that the tower was the type that had a narrow vertical stem with a large cylinder on the top. The cables we were riding on hung down flat against the cylinder so when we got to that point our "wall" was directly overhead. So we had to push ourselves away from the cylinder while operating our wenches until our feet/plank was at the bottom and could ride against it. There was a rubber wheel centered on the plank that rode against the tower at that point. (There was another fun moment on the way down when the rubber wheel reached the bottom of the cylinder. We'd get it just to that point and then "1-2-3" we'd go down and the plank, with us on it, would swing toward the stem of the tower once again placing the wall of it right in our faces. We had to be prepared to hold ourselves away to keep from getting knocked off. It really wasn't that difficult because one becomes pretty damn strong facing a situation like that. After the first time there was nothing to it.)
Once we were against the wall of the cylinder the set up was as solid as being on the ground. We were slightly tilted toward the "wall" due to the cables top contact point was the top of the wall of the cylinder and at our end it was a foot or so away from it. That tension kept us solid as a rock. The wind had no effect on us.
All the way up, (and down for that matter), the set up was pushed by the wind into a swirling oval due to the stem being so far from us. That really wasn't so bad because the set up felt solid enough. But it was just a strange ride. Once, going down, I forgot to release the latch from our security rope and move it down and I was lifted about 4 inches off the plank. So I'm hanging there and can't reach my wench. The other guy had to walk over, reach around me and wench the plank back up to my feet. That's the kind of thing that only happens to me one time.
I had 10 sheets of pounced paper that ranged from 10' long to 24' long and 4' wide. The pattern was made with an opaque projector at night on the back of large block garage wall that was 11' feet high. My cousin, who'd never done anything like it before but has a good head for that sort of thing helped me. Tracing it in sections and hand pouncing it took us 10 hours.
My plan was to pounce the entire thing on and be sure it was positioned correctly before painting. But the night before I realized that at that size I wouldn't be able to tell from the close vantage point on the scaffold if it was right or not and I damn sure couldn't go to the ground and see it from there.
My decision then was to start at the bottom and roll it on from the bottom up, spraying paint from spray cans in lieu of chalk dust, and painting that section as we rolled it back down and off. We did each section that way and the entire job took 9 hours over two days as one day the wind was way too bad to ride that contraption so we had to quit early.
This was a job I could not get a deposit for. I argued the point but the contractor said, "What if I give you a 50% deposit and you go out an blow it on wine, women and song then come here on Monday and find that you can't go up that high? Not everyone can." I had to concede because I didn't know myself if I could go that high. He offered to buy all the materials I put on a list, (they provided the special paint), and we'd square up once the job was completed. I felt really unsure of that deal but I couldn't argue with the possibility that I would not be able to go so high.
Well, the job went great. It got done much quicker than I expected due to my change in the pouncing process. The contractor came to the job site to see how it was going just as we were coming down for the last time. "Man, you really took me on that one", he chided. Then said with a big grin, "It looks great from the road!" Within 20 minutes we walked to his truck and settled up with him writing me a check. He was happy that the job was done ahead of schedule and I was happy to be down from there.
As you can tell I don't know the proper terminology of all this stuff either. But it got done and very well I might add.
Funny little story. About 3 months later my 5 year old son and I drove past that tower and he pointed to it saying, "There's that tower dad!". I said, "Yeah pal, it's pretty cool." He then looked up at me and said with a big grin, "Yep, and when you're gone I'm gonna tell everybody I did it!" He's 21 now and smiles when he remembers that.
Sorry to go on and on but I haven't told that story to anyone for a long, long time. And whenever I did it was never to anyone who could actually relate to it until just now.
