How Installing Interior Signs Made a Big Impact at Window World Office

June 16, 2017 By Mark Hackley

How Installing Interior Signs Made a Big Impact at Window World Office

Need help installing interior signs out there?? Last week I got a call from the local Window World retail store asking if Augusta Sign Company could install some letters they had removed from a wall during their recent store improvements. They had the letters but they needed a professional sign company to make a new pattern and re-install their brand in the newly renovated space and add some vinyl lettering and window lettering as well.

“Sure,” I replied, knowing that I could tackle the job in simple fashion as I have lots of experience with making and installing corporate wall graphics. Here are a few pictures I snapped as I completed the project last week in downtown Waynesboro, Virginia…

Augusta Sign Company manufactures and installs interior logos and signs made of flush, computer-cut vinyl, acrylic, metal, and wood at schools, medical offices, corporate headquarters, government facilities, and pretty much anywhere people want to show off their brand to the visiting public!

Mark Hackley owns and operates Augusta Sign Company, currently located in Waynesboro, VA, but keep posted! Augusta Signs will be moving to the County sometime soon to better serve the entire Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County area. 540-943-9818

Restoring Large Wood Sign for Bridgewater Pharmacy

May 8, 2017 By Mark Hackley

Restoring Large Wood Sign for Bridgewater Pharmacy

LONG MAINTENANCE PERIOD

Restoring large wood sign faces can be challenging! It had been roughly twenty years since I had built the sign for Patrick O’Shea, owner of the Bridgewater Pharmacy, an independently owned and operated pharmacy located in Bridgewater, Virginia. Independently owned pharmacies are becoming rare just like independently owned anything these days, and it’s good to know that the Bridgewater Pharmacy is still out there doing its thing!

Back when I had originally made the sign, I owned Tree Street Signs in Crimora, where we manufactured many cedar and redwood signs of this type for businesses and organizations across a wide spread, even outside of Virginia. This particular sign was challenging because of its size.

We fabricated the large panel from 2″ X 8″ CAHVG (clear, all-heart, vertical-grain) redwood boards, first running each board through the table saw to “plane” the edges flat for laminating the edges with West System Epoxy. We had to use long pipe clamps to hold the panel together while the epoxy set. After the glue cured, we sanded both sides of the panel with a sanding disc attached to an electric drill motor, starting with coarse grit and finishing with fine.

DURABLE FINISH

Once the wood was prepared, we primed the panels with a quality latex primer and then painted the panel with a quality oil-based enamel, in this case, One-Shot Brand Bulletin Paint. After that dried well, we cut a rubber stencil on our plotter and applied to both faces of the panel for sand-blasting. After blasting, we stained the background with our own homemade oil stain (70% Penetrol Oil with 30% Bulletin Enamel). This homemade stain works well on exterior cedar and redwood signs and does not peel and flake over time like paints would tend to do.

After staining the open background, we let dry and then peel off the stencil and the sign is ready to go, after minor touch ups here and there. For the Bridgewater sign, we had long steel side irons manufactured at the welding shop and used these to pierce the posts on each sign and hold the panel in place. The side iron design allows for adjustments over time as the wood posts may move.

The sign was overdue for maintenance but was still intact and good for another twenty years after repainting, When restoring the sign, I sealed a few vertical gaps in the boards with Liquid Nail, sanded the old paint off the letters, re-stained both sides of the entire sign with homemade oil stain, then tediously re-primed and re-painted all the lettering, borders, side-irons, and posts. The finished job made it look like Patrick had a nice, new sign, even though it was in it’s third decade of service!

For more information about new or restored exterior wood signs in Virginia, contact Mark Hackley, owner of Augusta Sign Company: (540)943-9818, or e-mail mhackley@augustasigncompany.com.

5 Good Reasons To Wrap Your Vehicles

March 28, 2017 By Mark Hackley

5 Good Reasons to Wrap Your Vehicles

Switch Old Yellow Page Advertising Dollars to Investments in Eye-Catching, Moving Billboards

Here are 5 Good Reasons to Wrap Your Vehicles at your business in Waynesboro, Staunton, and Augusta County, Virginia. Companies are replacing investments in Yellow Page ads with electronic digital signs and vehicle wraps, the two best advertising bangs for their bucks these days.

Back in late November, I closed a deal to letter 2 vans and a box truck for Vailes Heating and Air of Fishersville, Virginia. In early December, my mother got sick and I had to put the project on hold. My mom passed away in January, and I did not start on the vehicle re-branding project until late January, early February. After I did the first van, the customer decided to re-brand seven vans instead of two, and I completed them all this week.

The customer chose what I term “partial vehicle wraps” where in this case the bottoms of the vehicles boast bold, blue wavy stripes that cover the entire lower portion of the vehicles, while the tops sport traditional cut vinyl graphics. The renovated fleet of vehicles is eye-catching. Every day I see one of the new vehicles on the road and they now keep up with competing companies’ vehicle advertising out there on the streets of Augusta County!

Re-Brand Your Vehicles for Brand Continuity

Vailes Heating and Air offers several services and they used different vans to promote them: Home Renovations, Heating and Air, Plumbing, Pools and Spas. Their old vans suffered what we termed “brand crisis” and it was hard for customers to figure out what Vailes was all about as their vehicles sped down the road or pulled up in their drive.

After meeting with the C-Level people in charge of business strategics, we decided to highlight the Vailes name and sub-highlight the various services. They developed a main brand and three sub-brands with the help of a local graphic designer, and the new vehicle graphics weave the various identities together so the branding makes sense and is consistent across all the vehicles and brands.

Make a Worn-Out Fleet Look Like New For Less

Over time a corporate fleet can get ragged.

The Vailes fleet consisted of standard Chevy and Ford vans. They were the typical, basic-white work vans and were fairly the same size and design so that the graphic design stayed consistent across all the vehicles. The only slight variation was that the Ford body lines accommodated a shorter bottom stripe than the Chevy’s.

The old vehicle graphics were not only inconsistent, but were also faded and deteriorated. The old graphics were removed with chemicals and heat, and the vehicles were buffed before the new vinyl graphics were applied. One of the administrators at Vailes said the vehicles looked like new after they were re-lettered, and commented on the cost difference to renovate the vans with graphics versus buying a whole new fleet of vehicles. That was great information to consider as companies make these types of decisions.

Create 24-Hour Visibility of Your Brand

Every day I go to Lowes or Wal-Mart or any place that has a big parking lot in town, I notice the many brands of area businesses on parked vehicles. It’s hard to miss them unless you’re blind. They are everywhere and are becoming the new way to spend advertising dollars. When you letter your car, truck or van you create a moving billboard that is out there working every day!

The neat thing about vehicle lettering as an advertising tool is that you can choose how much you want to spend. It’s like taking an ad out in the paper or Yellow Pages. You can have a one-line or one-column black and white ad or a full-page, full-color charmer. That’s completely up to you. For Augusta Sign Company, I personally choose to use a set of magnets with my brand for my front doors and a decal on my spare tire cover in the back, but some people want full vehicle wraps.

Full wraps take lots of talent and experience and I just don’t have the patience to tackle them on a regular basis, but I’d recommend using some new guys in the field for that: Walter and Geiger Hansen at Viking Forge Design in Waynesboro. I’ve been in their shop a few times and the last time I was there they had wrapped an entire car and it looked like it was painted. God bless them for having the skill patience to be able to do this!

Keep Up With The Jones’s

Many of your competitors have already produced flashy vehicle advertising that is getting lots of chatter out in the community. It’s your choice to keep up or not. I personally don’t want to be swamped with business that I would not be able to keep up with being a small sign shop. But if you want more work, then professional vehicle wraps are a great way to go!

Consider partial wraps to save money. The construction services company that hired me to letter their fleet had gotten pricing on full wraps that were more than double the cost of my partial wrap solutions. It never hurts to shop around.

I guess that about wraps it up!

Mark Hackley is owner of Augusta Sign Company in Waynesboro, VA 22980 540-943-9818

Five Advantages of Carved Wood Signs

March 1, 2017 By Mark Hackley

Five Advantages of Carved Wood Signs

Five advantages of carved wood signs over say choosing other various forms of signs are not really hard to see, if you look closely.

First, the main advantage is interest. The carved letters make the letters interesting. Since light reflects at an angle, the V-Carved letters serve to boost reflectivity. Add gold leaf and, “Wow!”

“The lettering on our new church directional sign looks great,” said Kenneth Lee of Rodes United Methodist Church in Nelson County, Virginia. I just completed a carved wood sign for Mr. Lee after his former sign was destroyed during routine mowing. (See accompanying photos of this nice little sign.)

Here are four more advantages of carved wood signs:

Carved signs last a long time: Since the wood is usually cedar, redwood, or mahogany, these species are insect and rot resistant. With 10-year maintenance periods, the signs will long outlive most sign buyers!

Carved signs value is much greater than signs made with less-precious materials and less-tedious labor. These signs are truly the Cadillacs of signs, but if you’re okay with a Kia then that’s your prerogative.

Carved signs can be designed to blend in with the environment, yet stand out as graphics.

Carved signs look awesome when spot-lit!

I’m sure there are even many more reasons why your church, your professional office, your medical practice, your law firm, your downtown retail store, your florist, your retirement center, your hospital, your school, your veterinary clinic, (see where I’m going here?) would choose a carved wood sign over other options. Let us know if you’d like to see your name in WOOD!

WOODN’T YOU? I SURE WOOD! (But I’m partial.)

Mark Hackley is owner of Augusta Sign Company, Waynesboro, VA 22980

Decals – an easy way to brand your retail store

February 15, 2017 By Mark Hackley

Decals – an easy way to brand your retail store

Last week I was contracted to make and install about 30 decals of a well-known brand of residential and commercial paint. The owner of two retail stores, one in Waynesboro, Virginia and one in Staunton, had renovated their store interiors, repainting the shelving fixtures in an updated color. When they repainted the store fixtures, they painted over the old logos, so they hired me to make new ones.

The shelves ranged in width from about 48″ to 65″ and the decals were designed to fit all widths. I provided a scaled sketch and presented a color swatch of the decal color. The customer could not get a copy of the logo in vector format, so I was able to vectorize what they provided as a jpg. The project took about 10 days to complete from the time I received their proof approval and deposit check, taking about a week to get the vinyl material, a day to cut and prepare the graphics, and a few days to schedule and make the final deliveries and installations at both stores.

Even though it was an interior application, I used high performance 10-year exterior Avery vinyl film for the decals so they will last a long time.

Mark Hackley, President of Augusta Sign Company, Waynesboro, VA 22980. 540-943-9818

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