Support.ADA

Here's my .02 ... Everyone's money is the same to me, religion / politics, I don't desriminate against anyones dollar and their right to spend it with me. Church's (the baptist mostly) always worked out well for me, as I do ongoing indoor work and outsourced the big stuff. Nothing like a one off $300 ada sign that I kept a stack of back at the shop to make me play nice. Church commitee's are a nightmare - yes - and I charge them for that. As long as I'm getting paid, I'll sit there and listen to you argue - no problem. Any kind of committee - charge well and chrage often, and belive me you won't be sitting there for long before they figure out, they can argue without you. SignVine, just another sign broker with a bad idea. Think about the time and effort to get a company signed up with this, in hopes THEY will advertise their whatever for themselves. Lets face it - if they were that good at raising money, they could afford their own sign to fit their purpose or would be making better use of the money on whatever they are doing. No one is going to split their contribution feeds over two projects. The lead time from contact to getting on the board to making enough money to buy the sign.... way way way to long. Hell even a 1.2 million build has a 6 - 8 month lead time of which we spend maybe 20 active hours till the job hits - and even that we bitch about. Image the man hours into this process before you get an actual job - IF you ever make enough. They are a broker - so most of the money goes to the manufacture and installers... leaving you what - at most $10K for the pass through? And from I hear now adays you all just don't have the margins for even that. According to Whois - signvine.org was created Dec last year.... Bet they don't make it another year. My suggestion - they have a builders and patron's page - call one of them as an installer that got approached by these guys and see what they say, or even if they know them. Why doesn't someone with more money than brains ever come to me for an idea? :)

I break down and take off from blueprint interior division 10 ADA braille signage and interior way finding packages. I also do full color evacuation maps at less than half the price of internal employee's. My breakdowns allow companies outsourcing the interior signage packages the ability to get apples to apples comparison's. over 15 years in this industry ensures my breakouts are ADA federally compliant and include every space on your blueprints. I return full color PDF proofs overlaying the blueprints along with an excel list of every space, ID number, room number, room name, and sign type. I can even include interior room dimensions for those companies installing architectural objects. Benefits: Ensure the outsource companies aren't missing any vital information and returning a complete package cost Cut and past your returned quotes into one document for easy comparison Color proofs gives your customer piece of mind and a polished professional look other bid packages won't have. Make your jobs easy and fast to bid, ensuring more returned bids on time and giving you more choice of suppliers Don't do a lot of interior packages? Cherry pick what you want to quote and get the benefits of a ADA signage specialist for a single package. Do you manufacture braille? Cut your estimators time in half by letting me do the grunt work and saving their time for completing packages and adding sensitive company information like cost's. I also do 2012 ADA compliant evacuation maps for less than half the cost of a graphic artist or internal employee. I am not affiliated with any single braille or ADA manufacture or re-seller so I poss no conflict of interest. Non compete contract available for your security and piece of mind. Want to see samples? Questions? please contact me at Support.ada@gmail.com

Disney used to pull that crap. In the fine print for a lot of interior packages sold direct to major construction firms, you will often find the "you don't get paid till we get paid" statement. I never actually read the 400 page document till I wasn't getting paid from one of the largest construction firms on the eastern seaboard who had done work for the tribe (the indians) up in North Carolina. Funny thing about tribes, they are federal case's when they don't pay and I had to wait till the lawyers were done spitting at each other to get paid. The other side of it is bonding. If I take a job I'm required to install and it ties up part of my bond, I can't take more work till that bond clears. If they are pissy about one sign, I could be waiting a long long time. By outsourcing the install, I make it someone else's problem while covering my own ass. It's shady and pathetic and you won't make any money on it. I personally enjoy getting them on the phone so I can laugh in their face.

The need for a super high end paint depends on what your painting. To say all sign shops need to invest in high end Mathews is not true. Most internal sign manufactures don't need the expense or issues provided with Mathews. Most of our stuff is direct print or back sprayed onto acrylic and Mathews does NOT like being shot without a base coat or primer - in my application you can't do this and need a paint built for plastic specifically. Mathews does self level, which is great, but if you are in a high humidity area, your error rate shoots up. It's a pain in the ass to shoot properly if your not doing it all day long every day and unless you use hardeners and have a clean area for drying your 1000 sq ft of acrylic sheet before cutting, you will get all kinds of crap in it. You can't fix Mathews, you have to reshoot it - you can fix back sprayed plastic paint - or if it's to bad - it's cheap enough to cut around it and lose the piece to scrap. Mathews doesn't chemically bond to plastic - where krylon spray paint has been chemically formulated to actually bond into the surface of the plastic by slightly melting it. Can't paint match it, but if your dealing with an accent piece, sometimes this is the easiest and best method. Sherwin Wlliams Commercial division has been producing industry paints for over 100 years. They have hardeners and self leveling paints just like Mathews. In my area Sherwin William paint is considered "hobby" paint, so is not subject to my local legal painters issues even though the stuff is probably just as deadly if you are swallowing it and I buy 4-8 gallons a week. Obviously paint is not my bread and butter, but i do paint almost everything i manufacture, unless it's direct print. A side note on flat beds - if you aren't running two solid to three shifts now, you probably can't afford it. Look around for slightly used equipment - there is a lot of it out there that has been used for 6 months by someone else who thought they could afford it; greatly reduced in price and still under warranty.

I'll take sweating my ass off over trying to finish up in a snow storm any day of the week....

How much does a Matthews Set up cost now a days? I spray very little metal so the initial cost of mixer and spray hood, etc was prohibitive for me. I used a Sherwin Williams commercial division metal paint for my stuff. Self leveling, cleaned up like normally, wouldn't kill me in my little unprofessional booth and Sherwin Williams would color match it. I have red ground level signs in mountain weather next to roads for 10 years still looks decent.

I thought it was slow compared to past years, but I was there on the first day - Thursday. For interior manufacturing I only saw two really nice "new" items. One was a new type of plastic that disperses LED light better to create an even glow through the face and sides. The other was a opoxy that made interior polymer signage indestructible. Impressive stuff that basically is clear spray-able Teflon. Everything else was same old same old except the shear number of Chinese. Its always fun talking to other interior sign manufactures and that was pretty much my entire day. This was my 11th year and I expected a lot more LED interior lite signage of which were was very little. Same old LED frames over and over and over... nothing cool or inventive or truly new to the field. Sure they string the LED's in different ways but nothing a large producer can buy and use with their own signage. Besides the Chinease, most of the companies I already have purchased from in the past, I didn't run into one new company that I would have found useful. The problem is the shows are so incredibly expensive now a days the small specialty guys who are the leaders in new and cool can't afford to present. The lack of give aways was depressing as well. My shelf of lite ice cubes, rubber balls made out of the latest opoxy's, metal leafed calling cards has nothing new this year. Sure I got a pen and a plastic bank for the kid, but common.... at least give me a cut magnet from the CNC guys. I did get a card from one of the Chinese guys that had a flat USB drive embedded in the card. Nifty idea... card didn't work.... go figure. If i didn't live in Florida I probably wouldn't have gone. I'm still a little miffed at paying $15.00 for parking... but that's the venue not ISA.

The translation is not patentable, The software he wrote - the translator - was copywritted. Accent used to hold the patent on the braille bead's and probably still does in the US. When you bought your translator you would get a certificate to buy the braille balls as well. Flex uses a plug-in - not cut and paste, in 2013 they changed over to some other software system because of the multi-language ability. Duxbury now has a multi language translator so they might have gone back to them. Last I understood CroelDraw use's MegaDot as it's plug in so you don't have to cut and paste. I don't know about AI, but I assume they have something similar. MegaDot is built by duxbury as well. It's the DOS engine for the translation.

Braille output is done with a conversion program to machine language through software written by Duxbury. http://www.duxburysystems.com/products.asp Duxbury started by writing the conversion program for books. It makes the braille #2 - the "reading" braille for blind people and the ADA required braille for signage. The "Font" braille which is Type 1 braille is a direct letter to letter conversion and is not legal on braille signage. Most braille layout's are done with the font just for ease and then the proper conversion is laid in at time of production. Type #2 braille is truncated to represent sounds and double letters. It also includes symbols that cue the blind to capital lettering, numbers, etc. Duxbury has contracts with the software designers that produce software to run CNC flat bed machines. The machine the sign industry use's to make raster braille. They also have contracts with software designers for plug in's. For example you can buy a license to the conversion software for Corel. When you purchase the machinery and thus the sign package to run it, you have also purchased the license to produce #2 braille. That's the crash course in raster braille production Eight years to late for this post but maybe helpful to someone else.

Right now the LED / lighting market, where it pertains to the sign industry, involve mostly illumination of exterior signage. Box signs, channel / can lettering, racetrack illumination is the easiest and most accessible foothold into the sign industry that lighting has historically had. Lighting for interior signage was few and far between because of the size, power and heat requirements of older lighting techniques were not really appropriate for most interior signage or sign packages. LED’s have changed everything, including the accessibility for the lighting industry in the interior signage and awards market. I have 15 years in interior signage (division 10 / ADA federally regulated / Braille & way finding) and small monuments. I owned my own commercial sign shop for many years before selling right before the economy/building crash. I went to work for a large international exterior sign company and creating from the ground up a full functional division to produce interior signage that allowed us to offer full sign packages for some of the largest fortune 500 companies in the world. Our polymer division was the first ever to produce braille packages in China. This was all occurring at the beginning of the LED explosion into the sign market. During this time I developed a marketing plan for several systems that combined my new LED knowledge with my manufacturing and sales knowledge of the interior division 10/ ADA sign market. At the time, the company decided not to invest in this “new” technology and being a sign company instead of a lighting company, felt the direction I wanted to go in was too far outside their business scope. Five years later, I feel my industry is overdue for a standard for lite interior signage. I’m now seeking a full time position with a company that wants to be that standard and supply bracket and lighting hardware to the interior sign manufacturing industry. The company I seek does not want to be the artist; they want to be the canvas seller. They want to sell wholesale direct to the largest interior sign producers and suppliers in the country. To be cost effective, I believe the company I seek is already sourcing direct from LED manufactures overseas. Thank You for your time, Please contact me if you are interested in a copy of my resume or a more in-depth conversation. Support.ada@gmail.com