• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

TBT Electric Sign & Aluminum Sign

Billct2

Active Member
I saw these two signs were still up after 30 years, done while I worked at Morgan Sign CO (now gone).
The electric sign face is cut out red & black acrylic pinned to a white acrylic face. The face details were hand painted with black one shot. The other sign is .040 aluminum all hand lettered with one shot. Funny thing is I remember when we replaced the top name panel for some reason and the aluminum wasn't the same brand and was a slightly different shade of white. I told him that it would even out after a while, guess I was wrong.
 

Attachments

  • 1.JPG
    1.JPG
    149.8 KB · Views: 224
  • 3.jpg
    3.jpg
    93.9 KB · Views: 200

T_K

New Member
Other than the 2 whites, the panel sign still looks good. The liquor sign looks like the red needs some help, but it's still perfectly legible after 30 years. Looks like good quality signs.
 

signbrad

New Member
I worked on a few plastic faces like this when I was coming up. 1/8-inch acrylic glued to a 1/4-inch white acrylic face. We glued the letters with Weldon using a syringe. If you did it right, capillary action allowed the glue to neatly spread under the cutout letters and give an even color when the sign was burning. A face like this lasted a long time. No one makes this kind of durability much anymore.

If you were cutting quantities of letters you could stack the acrylic, as many as four layers, and cut four letters at a time—unless you used cheap plastic. Then the letter edges all melted together.

Brad in Kansas City
 
Top