Trimless Channel Letter Assembly Advice

[DarkerKat]

Background: We have an SDS machine and have been "dipping our toes" into Trimless channel letters (for about 3 years now)
Our current process works OK, but not great. We bend the coil, cut the acrylic faces, glue the acrylic faces in, paint the channels, then mount the backers via acrylic blocks and screws through the side of the channels.
The main issue we're running into is that when we go to paint we have to navigate around the acrylic face reveal around the edges of the coil. This edge is a pain to try and paintmask off but we can't (or won't, i'm not in charge of purchasing) get different colored coil for every job. Our fabrication guys rely on glueing the faces into place to help form the letters which has to be done before they are painted. Every time a real job comes up the team takes on a "well it has to get done now, no testing" mentality and we brute force it.
Curious how other companies handle painted coils on Trimless letters - is there a better process I can recommend to the team?

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

The ones I see have screws that go along the edge of the returns and bit into the bottom lip of the acrylic, that way the face is removable. Maybe yours are fancier?

 

[DarkerKat]

I don't know if ours are "fancier" per-say, this is just the method we are using but right now we're screwing the backers on rather than face. This is what SDS recommends, but they have be verrry hands-off since we purchased the machine so they may not be the best resource (i dont know if they have ever even considered the issue of painting coil)
Few reasons we do it this way at the moment - lets us have the screws on the sides of the channels towards the back so they aren't quite as noticeable, and it avoids the issue of gaping around the edge of the faces (there is a little lip so I dont think this should be happening but...) + I believe there was a concern about the screws being visible when the faces are illuminated.

 

[JBurton]

This edge is a pain to try and paintmask off but we can't (or won't, i'm not in charge of purchasing) get different colored coil for every job

Surely it's and issue of 'they don't make different colors' rather than your company being cheap. We stock black, white and red coil. Why on earth would anyone want to paint a set and wait for them to dry rather than stocking 2 or 3 relatively small coils?
This may be a dumb suggestion, but could you shoot the formed coils before mounting them to the acrylic?

 

[DarkerKat]

Surely it's and issue of 'they don't make different colors' rather than your company being cheap. We stock black, white and red coil. Why on earth would anyone want to paint a set and wait for them to dry rather than stocking 2 or 3 relatively small coils?

Yeah it comes down to the coil not being available in colors we need - most of our work is very custom so it tends to be a situation where we literally wont be able to find coil in the color we need pre-made. We could find pre-made colors sometimes, but then you are looking at buying a whole roll of coil for a single job (say we wanted gold for example) - didn't intend for it to come across as calling the company cheap

 

[DarkerKat]

This may be a dumb suggestion, but could you shoot the formed coils before mounting them to the acrylic?

I don't know why it wouldn't let me do a multi-line quote.
The issue with doing this is two fold - We use the acrylic faces to help with the final forming of the channels (the glued faces help hold the channels into their proper shape) like a riveted backer would on standard channel letters. Also if there is no backer or face on the channels then you can get over-spray on the inside when you try and paint them - if it's a light color that may not matter but if it is a different color that may impact how well they light up once assembled.

To be clear though, that might be the right way to do it anyway? But selling the production team on a new method is going to require me to bring evidence of some kind evidence.

 

[JBurton]

We use the acrylic faces to help with the final forming of the channels (the glued faces help hold the channels into their proper shape) like a riveted backer would on standard channel letters.

So if the concern is cracking, grab some flex additive from matthews. I've installed painted perf with this used to paint it, it behaved just like regular perf.

Also if there is no backer or face on the channels then you can get over-spray on the inside when you try and paint them

It seems like masking the inside would be miles easier than the face, which is ironic that the film is on the outside of the coil on a primed product.

To be fair, I don't ever mess with these, let alone produce, so I'm not in the know, just offering input.