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The Land of Up-Over UPDATED!
By Cortland Kirkeby
Note: An abridged version of this article appears in our February 2008 issue.
Photo courtesy of NESCO Sales.
Just thinking about job sites—either in awe or with dread—keeps many a sign installer awake a night. Every job site is a challenge (some more challenging than others). The war stories range from aggravating to amazing.
Take, for example, one site involving a fast food restaurant. The main sign is supposed to tower one hundred feet in the air. The rest of the signage ensemble includes a drive-through sign and other signs to go around the building. The contractor is late in his preparations for your arrival, and opening day is two weeks away—or less. You have to keep moving to stay out of the way of the asphalt crew. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the stripers aren’t far behind. Meanwhile, to install that one hundred-foot sign, you and your equipment have to leave “footprints,” because smaller, lighter equipment won’t take you high enough. The landscape people don’t smile as you pass by.
Whether large or small, every job site involves something new or unexpected. “Right now, they’ve got more products within the sign industry, such as signs with LED lighting systems, that have created different issues such as taller signs and bigger signs,” says Bruce Bayless, sales specialist for Dawes Crane & Rigging of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “You can’t just go out there and slap a piece of paper on with your name on it.”
Meeting the challenge of each job site requires good communication, good planning, and good equipment. Anything else and you might be left hanging.
Getting a First-hand Look
“You first need to visit the site in person,” recommends Alan Dotts, sales manager for Aichi USA in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Dotts divides the important items to look for into two categories: ground level accessibility and overhead obstacles. Ground level questions include: Is there a parking lot? Are cars parked in your way? How far must you go to reach where the sign will go? Some of the overhead issues are: (1.) electric wires, (2.) cables, (3.) other signs, and (4.) the building itself being in the way.
Sometimes you don’t have the luxury to preview a job site. Instead you have to rely on blueprints, drawings, and other representations—as well as answers to pertinent questions. “A lot of times, if we’re installing a sign for somebody else, we get contracted before the structure is even built,” says Peter Foster, vice-president of High Tech Signs in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We go upon standards of building practices (such as the National Building Code). Then we’ll ask questions like, ‘What’s the material made of?’”
How Tall is Enough?
Photo courtesy of Saxton Sign Corporation.
Another key facet of evaluating a job site is matching the size and height of the sign to its intended audience. Commercial signage and professional basketball both adore the big fellas, but sometimes the smaller guys are the best fit. “I don’t like to think of best as being the tallest; I like to think of it as being the most effective,” says Kevin Dalton, owner and CEO of Dalton Signs in Kingsland, Georgia. “You can control that by height, content, and a lot of different parameters. We consider the distance from the road, and we make sure to size our content to be legible from the road.
“Ask yourself, who is your captive audience and where are they located? Take a truck stop at an interstate interchange, for example. A lot of times, they don’t have property specifically at the front on the interstate. In that case, yes, they would need a very tall sign. But if you’re on one of the thoroughfares going through town—and your audience is within 100 to 200 feet of your sign—you don’t necessarily need to be the highest one on the block.”
Up Close and Maneuverable
Photo courtesy of Stamm Manufacturing.
One of the most important tools for sign installation today is the bucket truck—although for many newer models, buckets have been replaced by baskets big enough to hold two or three workers. “The guys today want bigger baskets,” says Mick Gerber, assistant sales fleet manager of NESCO Sales & Rental in Bluffton, Indiana. “Instead of the standard 30-by-54, they now want the 40-by-60. Back in the day, none of the guys thought platform jibs were worth it. Now everyone’s doing them.”
Several job sites have proven easier for Dalton and his crews to navigate, thanks to their Aichi ITZ 40-A. “It’s got a 5-by-12-foot work platform at the end of a telescopic boom,” Dalton says. “The basket can rotate 360 degrees on the boom, and the boom can rotate 360 degrees on the chassis. It makes it incredibly nice for jobs like large channel letters or flex-face signs, because you can put two or three people in the basket and have more than one set of hands on the job.”
Stamm Manufacturing of Ft. Pierce, Florida, has found that its customers have discovered that a big platform can really speed up the work. “A sign professional can walk around on a bigger platform,” says Sales Manager Albert Patterson. “He can take the whole sign/light with him in that platform, go up and put it together, and take the old one down with him. It saves a lot of time and labor.”
The capacity to hold extra workers can be especially important when dealing with windy conditions such as those Dalton’s crews encounter in southeast Georgia. “We’re subject to high heat conditions and hurricane force winds,” Dalton says. “It’s rather windy on the coast at times. We have more control of it. You can hold onto more of the face while you’re going up in that basket. If you’re just in a truck that’s got a single-man basket and a jib, the wind can carry that all over the place. If the sign is any size, you usually have two people up there helping anyway.”
However with smaller units—which go only forty feet or so—the key is maneuverability. Because the basket can move so easily, the vehicle itself, such as a Ford 550, need not be parked so precisely.
Baker Equipment of Richmond, Virginia, recently introduced the smaller, compact MX200-DC bucket truck to the sign industry. The twenty-one-foot-long vehicle features 66 feet of working height, 30 feet of side reach (at 30 feet high), and a 2-man rotating basket with 440-pounds capacity. The Non-CDL truck chassis also boasts a unique, full functioning, highly articulating Pagliero 66-foot aerial tower with a separately mounted full-functioning Palfinger 62-foot articulating crane, with digger/auger attachment, together with utility trailer hauling capability. The idea behind it is to promote job site flexibility and reduced manpower requirements. “When you start to use this truck, you have to have an open mind as to what you can do that you haven’t done before, because the articulating crane is quite different for [an] industry that’s used to the straight booms,” says Baker Equipment President Skip Baker. “You’ve got a lot of reach and articulation, yet you can bring it in and grab things close by without having a boom sixty feet in the air.”
Photo courtesy of Baker Equipment.
According to Baker, one advantage of smaller boom trucks is in the ability of users to get in and out of a job site quickly. He points out freestanding chain pharmacies such as CVS® and Wal-Greens® as an example. “Periodically a sign company is going to show up to change lightbulbs,” says Baker. “Those jobs are usually a contract with corporate headquarters, and then it’s deducted from the local pharmacy’s budget.
“Wal-Greens is the best example. Their corporate strategy is based on getting people from the parking lot, into the store, purchase, and back in the their car in twelve minutes or less. You bring in a large sign truck and that stops their flow, which is going to tick off the store manager. That’s their whole culture there. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, what’s this truck doing here?’ Then they’ll call and complain to corporate, because it’s coming out of the budget.”
So if you can go in with a relatively small truck,” continues Baker, “ take up one parking space, articulate right up to the sign, get your job done, and be gone before the store manager really kind of figures out what’s up, that’s the way to do it.
Baker adds that Bergen Sign Company in Paterson, New Jersey, recently used the MX-200 DC truck to maneuver into a crowded workspace and change out a freestanding Enterprise Rental Car pylon sign. “The only room they had was basically on the sidewalk and a little piece of tarmac out front,” he says. “If you had brought two or three pieces of equipment in there—maybe a crane and a bucket truck—not only would Enterprise have complained but so too would the legal research firm next door because the sign shop would’ve been blocking the driveway.
“This emphasizes the importance of bringing only one piece of equipment to the job site. In this case, Bergen employees parked the truck once. It stayed in place all day, and the operators were able to move around and reach everything.”
Photo courtesy of Baker Equipment.
Of course, several signs are placed a lot higher than forty feet. “Obviously the first consideration is height,” says Foster. “The bigger the truck, usually the more space it requires to set up. The larger bucket trucks need outriggers, which usually double their width. We typically buy the larger trucks with two-man baskets, as the signs we work on are usually bigger. The larger crane and personnel lifts have a very long truck and a very wide footprint with the outriggers in place—about twenty-four feet wide and twenty-four feet long. Typically these cranes are straight telescoping.”
Since once size doesn’t fit every job, sign installers should try to include a variety of vehicles in their fleets. “Where in the past, guys buying a fleet would generally just buy big trucks, now they’ve gotten a lot smarter and break up their fleets into some big trucks and some small trucks,” Dotts says.
This isn’t always easy, however, since installers must balance the cost of the vehicles with utilization; this leads to them renting some vehicles and purchasing others. “I have a rule of thumb that if they can use it somewhere between 60 to 70 percent of the time and get that kind of utilization out of it, then they ought to own it,” Bayless says.
“We partner with Direct Capital Corporation, and they do the retail financing for our customers,” adds Baker. “What we’ve found is that normally on an MX200-DC lease, you need to be able to make about $150 a day to cover the lease. I tell anyone interested: Can you make $150 a day for five days a week with this truck? If you can, go for it! With a lease, you’re not going to have so much capital out, and it usually works pretty well. But if they’re scratching their head and going, ‘Well I don’t know,’ then I try to talk them into considering a much smaller truck, a used truck, or something where they could generate the cash flow and then step up so that when they make that step beyond renting, but not all the way up to owning, leasing is a good option as well.”
Waiting in the Wings
Photo courtesy of Saxton Sign Corporation.
Sometimes the construction of a new commercial property resembles an elaborate stage production. Entrances and exits must be carefully planned. No one wants to be out on the stage and ready to sing while the orchestra is still asleep. “Communication is a big thing,” says Foster. “We’ve learned to call contractors two weeks in advance. A week will go by, and we’ll call them again. We’ll say, ‘If you guys aren’t ready, you’re going to be charged for the wait time.’ Signage is always the very last thing to go in, and it’s always up against a deadline.”
Another tough problem to plan around is automobile traffic. When workers from the Saxton Sign Corporation in Castleton On Hudson, New York, completed a one hundred-foot Exxon/McDonald’s sign near the Massachusetts Turnpike, state police were needed to divert the heavy flow of traffic. “People were going by at eighty and ninety miles per hour and we’re out there trying to work,” recalls Owner Mike Kellogg. “That’s a different kind of deal.”
One of Kellogg’s biggest job site planning challenges was Saxton’s role in building a casino in Utica, New York. It required the use of a 500-ton, 500-foot crane that had to be transported to the site on three tractor-trailers and then assembled on-site. “We had to set it up out in the parking lot,” Kellogg says. “We put it up on a tower up on the twenty-second floor, but we couldn’t get near the building. So that took a lot of planning and time.”
Then, of course, there are job sites (particularly for smaller jobs) where all you can do is just go in and get the job done. “There have been cases in New York City where, no matter what time we get there, there’ll be cars in the way,” says Kellogg. “So we get them towed or moved or whatever in order to get in to do the work. Those cases you can’t really plan; you just have to make it work when you get there.”
Planning for Tomorrow
Photo courtesy of Stamm Manufacturing.
Perhaps the most common mistake with any job site is the failure to plan for tomorrow. This is particularly true when it comes to power. “A lot of times, the power issue gets overlooked and customers end up having to go to alternative methods,” Dalton says. “Sometimes people don’t think about growing and needing additional signage out there, so they’ll put just enough out power there to supply what they put up initially. For example, if they’re considering a digital message center sometime in the future, they might want to run an extra conduit out there now for a data wire to control the message center’s content. “
Every job site is different, but with a winning combination of communication, equipment, and planning, every job site can be conquered.
—With additional reporting by Jeff Wooten
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