Group Sign

[Will Reyer]

Group Sign 07/13/18 Will Reyer

I'm not sure I'm actually in a band, but I play music with 3 other guys, definitely a group. We call it Four Guitars Alone Together, and we play round-robin, taking turns like singer/songwriters at a guitar pull. A couple times a year we play the local Farmer's Market. Last Saturday someone asked if we had a card, or were on Facebook. Well, no, but we will now. Somebody else asked what our name was. We could give him that, but it suggested I ought to make a sign.

This became the usual “usewotchewgot” design project. I laid out some 1-1/2” high letters in my version of Architectural Lettering, and determined that I could make a sign on a piece of 1x6, incorporating the name, that was 26-1/2” long. Had same on hand.

Contact-cemented a scrap of aluminum valley flashing roll on this, covered it with plastic WalMart shelf-covering material with the peel-off adhesive backing, added the name. Cut out the letters, removed the backing, leaving the letters covered. Pam had part of a can of Rustoleum flat black spray paint. Sprayed it on.

Immediately got exacto knife and tweezers and started pulling the covering from the letters. Worked fine for the word “Four”, then started pulling the paint with the masking (photo).

Too bad, I liked that a lot. I've done it before but not with Rustoleum. I've also sand-blasted lots of glass doing that but doubling up the layers of shelf paper and using fairly low air pressure.

Had a piece of 6mm underlayment plywood big enough. Added two brushed-on layers of exterior latex in green, left-over from painting our exterior doors. This time I pulled the cut-out letters from the plastic shelf paper and left the backing. Got a dollar spray can of white from Lowes, and added the lettering. The white bled minutely into the surface grooves of the plywood. It's usable (photo).

Determined to make folding saw-horse type stand for the sign, using the 1x6 sign itself for the upper stretcher or rail, and some 1x4 on-hand for the upper back stretcher and the lowers. Had just enough left of a piece of 1x12 to make 28-1/4” legs, ripping to 2-3/4” wide, plus a 9” long tip-jar shelf and a support bracket.

Got a pair of 2-1/2” hinges on the Lowes run to join the halves of the saw-horses, and two pair of 1-1/2” hinges for the tip-jar shelf and fold out support bracket.

The idea was to have a 30-degree included angle between the front and back horse legs, so cut 15-degree bevels on all 4 feet. Added the lower stretchers (1x4's) up 3-1/2” from the ground like toe-kick relief on kitchen base cabinets. Wanted the stretchers down reasonably low so in case the wind came up we could set a guitar case or something across them to hold the sign down. Assembly with glue and sheet rock screws.

Rope runs through the lower stretchers to hold them at the 30-degree included angle and comes over the tops of the stretchers to keep the rope from dragging on the ground if you carry the sign by the upper 1x4 stretcher. There's quarter-inch dowel protruding from the tip-jar shelf support that indexes into the bottom of the shelf. All folds flat for transit.