David-BYS

I understand the outrage of a lot of people on the neon side, but we sell LED in lieu of white neon at every opportunity. Red neon versus red LED is neither here nor there. But in white, for us, for our long-term customer satisfaction, LED is the way. Once the temps get to about 25 degrees in the winter, neon is really dim. On the nights when it gets to 15 degrees, the signs barely light at all & we start getting the service calls. We try to assure people to give it 2 or 3 nights when the temps come back up & save the cost of a service call, but they never believe us. Then we drive out there, show them the sign *is* working & they don't feel like they should have to pay for a sign that is not broken. Anger & bitterness is both directions. Then we hear the 60ma argument, but than you are punishing the neon 300 days a year for the 65 that it really needs the cold weather benefit.

The story we heard was 'prices were too high.' Given the prices we were competing against from General, I find that tough to believe. I think a portion of that is the fact that they took pride on producing in-house. The market is just moving away from that. I was joking with a national vendor last week that there is a big corporation here in St Louis that found a StL design firm to design interior signage, they sourced it to a Michigan firm for production, who then found me ... back here is StL ... to install it. Before email & digital photos, this would have been an all StL job. Times change. When the economy finally bounces, StL will be in need of some manufacturing capacity. Your benefit, Steve.

If you go to Google's homepage on Friday 5-21, the title bar is a PACMAN game. If you click it, you can play it. I got to the cherry & the strawberry before I got back to work.

I hope you enjoy your Wilkie better than we did. The rotator was too small for the crane it was attached to. If the truck had hydraulic outriggers, we probably could have managed, but swinging the crane to level the bed was too much. After the second or third time the rotator broke & the crane swung free, the staff wouldn't use it anymore. It was a 50' truck. Yours is likely more stout to begin with. If we only used the truck in level parking lots, we would have been fine, but pulling the truck onto a hillside without hydraulics was a no-no.

Skyhook (Phoenix Industries) was bought out by Manitowoc. Thankfully no relation at all to these goons.

Wow, if you weren't so Canadian I'd say sue their pants off! Sorry, had to throw a Canadian joke in there. I'd still say sue their pants off anyway. I'm happy to give people the chance to make things right, but these guys are stalling because they don't know what else to do. One thing I like about the bigger crane companies is bullet-proof engineering. Even small companies can engineer products to a high level of excellence. I keep coming back to our Skywalk (before Elliot bought them). That crane is better than it needs to be. Ever been under an American or Japanese car? They are almost universally tar colored. Ever been under a Porsche? If a part should be plated, it's plated, if it should be anodized, it's anodized. It's not just the price, it's a mind set.

We have an original SkyWalk with about 13' of tail swing. It's a pain, but you learn to live with it. It's less tail swing than you will see on the typical school bus. If those drooling idiots fine upstanding, background-checked citizens can operate a vehicle with that much back porch, surely you can too

I'm not sure I get what the ruckus is about. The gap from the turntable to the rear of the truck? The load rating of the truck after the crane is installed? We have assembled several trucks on our own at our shop. I can't speak for Skylift, but on a Skyhook tube crane, the center of gravity was about 3' in front of the turret. That looks like about what Skylift did. For road travel, that places most of the burden on the rear axle which is what you want. The big danger in rear-mount cranes is over loading the *front* axle, ironically. You still have the turret in front of the rear outriggers & in order for the 'trailer hitch to be the fifth outrigger' you would need to pull over the weight of the entire vehicle. I'm dubious. Go look at a rear-mount National or Manitowok. They have the main riggers even with the turret & one tiny rear rigger just 3 feet away. They *are* planning on the weight of the truck being enough to resist the moment of the load. My biggest concern is GVW. When you start with a 650 series truck, have a good bed, hydraulic outriggers and a 75' stick, you won't have any load rating left for payload. Lo Pro is a cool idea, but I think this scheme would have worked out better at a 50 or 60 foot crane rather than a 75....

Oh on more thing how do your guys handle a sign when the truck has to be parked really close to the structure and the sign is lower that your boom length? Bring on the knuckle boom!!!!!!!! LOL Have you seen a Skywalk? You can take two techs, the pattern, all the letters, your tool boxes, lunch & a water jug & not come back down until the job is done. They really are brilliant.

We have an 85" Elliot which is pretty good. The problem is it's single axle so it has very little payload. It really needs a tag axle so we can carry heavy stuff on the copious bed. We also have a 50' Skywalk. The original Skywalk from Vantage Point, before Elliot bought them out. Really great truck. Really really great truck. The guys call it the 'wonder truck.' A 16' platform is something akin to working on the ground. The only hardship is the truck is 36' long. I never once picked up the outriggers. It reached all if it from one spot. We also have a 101' National Crane (now Manitowac) and an old medium-duty 85' Skyhook. All of you with the ALTECs, I assume they are elbow trucks? We've tried, our guys despise elbow trucks. They seem so fussy compared to a straight stick.

We have always used Excel for estimates and a great big paper file for jobs. It's time to upgrade. I have downloaded a demo of ABCs Accutrack & I'm really excited to try it out. Does anyone use this is a different management software? I did a five year stint in the auto insurance business & ADP makes a shop manager software for body shops that is amazing. I want that, but I don't fix cars. Toss me some opinions.

People on this forum can make things mindlessly complicated. That is a standard profile for crown molding in the 1920. I would recommend getting a styrene crown molding & ripping it down on a table saw to just the piece of the profile you need. here is a link http://www.architectural-ornament.com/prod...t.aspx?catId=92 of a company we used before for outdoor crown molding on a dentist's sign: http://www.signsearch.com/portfolioImages%.../Signsearch.jpg