Hand-crafted built-up letters remain a popular choice
Sign Here Leicester is celebrating its 30th year in business and despite the current pandemic situation the demand for reasonably priced, high quality built-up letters has never been greater, says Rob Gardner of Sign Here.
Things have changed a bit over the years but people still want a quality made product at a reasonable price. Adapting our schedule around the furlough scheme proved too difficult so we reverted back to having the staff working full time; we are even pushing them for more overtime.
We have been very lucky to have a constant stream of work from a large leisure group and this, on top of our usual trade work, has been tricky juggling deadlines but our in-house production facilities means we can keep close control in order to achieve customer’s requirements.
Since our humble beginnings in 1990 from a corner shop running just a small vinyl plotter, we have developed into a company serving a very large client base, the vast majority of which are trade contacts in the sign industry. Moving to larger premises and investing in machinery over the years has enabled us to turn around a fast and efficient service in house.
We can literally have customer’s orders on the workshop floor within minutes, obviously a massive advantage in out fast-moving industry.
The introduction of our first CNC machine gave us the platform to start serving the trade with flat cut letters in a variety of materials including aluminium, Foamex, composite, acrylic and wood. This then developed into taking on our first skilled acrylic letter builders and the kit required to progress further.
Our biggest step was then to purchase a laser cutter as the demand for metal letters was greater and greater plus the employment of metal letter builders gave us the ability to control time scales a lot better. The leisure centre projects mainly consist of laser cut descaled stainless steel letters with hand fabricated built-up returns soldered Into position then painted to RAL/Pantone colour.
These in turn, are then mounted onto opal acrylic back trays on spacers with LEDs affixed to give halo illumination, then mounted onto painted aluminium baseplates and fixing rails which contain all the LED connection feeds. The first step was the installation, working from powered access units; it was a case of fixing the brackets into place, liaising with on site electricians to connect the feeds and mount the pre-wired sets into location.
I think it is a common misconception that we are only a trade supply company but we do offer a full design to installation service nationwide across multiple sectors. We often hear the comment: “I didn’t know you did that.”