Need Help Backlit and/or Dimensional Sign - help needed

[Evan Gillette]

Understood, but I mean something like you drop it while putting it up or something flexes and things come apart inside. Something that is not the vendors fault. With only 40%, you're really gonna be reaching far into your pocket, when you don't have deep pockets to begin with. Scheduling problems, the print goes on wrong, someone wires it wrong by mistake. Any number of things can go wrong. That's why they're called mistakes. Sure if the vendor does something wrong and you hafta re-do something, they'll cover the parts, but generally, not your labor the second time around.

We did a Chennai letter and free form sign for a customer about 2 years ago and the connections were all behind a fake wall with access from only the interior foyer. About 3 months after the job was installed 1/2 the letters stopped working. Vendor sent the replacement parts, but it was our on dime to fix it. However, doing it in-house, we had far more than 40% on top, so the trip there and back and the hours to change it out was more than covered. That all I'm talking about.

Completely agree if that is the case for your shop. But for many shops, including mine, the overhead of equipment for building channel letters in house (efficiently) would put me way below the margin I have on outsourcing them. This of course is dependent on volume. Any shop selling channel letters should know how to install and service and work with them. Just like anything else we sell. As far as mistakes are concerned it is no different than any product, if you cant cover the cost of your mistakes you just wont be in business very long.

 

[Rob G Momentum]

That brings up another point, what wholesale channel letter manufacturers do you use and what has your experience been like? I am always looking for new/alternatives for supply.

Ally Wholesale is awesome to work with and beyond reasonable.

 

[firehouseneon]

I have a similar question along this line.. We are making an outdoor backlit sign with translucent vinyl applied. For the acrylic which white should we use 7328, 2447 or 2406? The vinyl will be illuminated from behind with neon. I have ready people using 7328...but also told that 2406 is ideal

 

[MikePro]

This is not a standard square backlit - which is fairly easy. I'm looking for a light box sign looking like this:

aluminum fabrication, acrylic push-thru dimensional lettering/logo. use LED and you'll basically never have to service the sign. The only thing that may fail, would be the power supply, but if you install it seperate from the sign cabinet, you can make the sign as difficult to service as you'd like because the power supply easily accessible via a box in the ceiling inside of the building.