We were hired by a local architect and contractor to make and install some interior and exterior plate metal letters on a new building for an area-wide school district service center, which is basically a facility for teacher training and teacher conferences for a large area of Northeast Texas.

 

 

 

These two sets of letters and logos were cut from aluminum plate, powder coated and were to be stud mounted both inside and out. I had bid on the job from drawings months before, but I never knew the exact surface they were to be mounted to. Both installs, as it turned out, would be the kinds of stud mounting projects that try both your patience and your skill, and we’ll take a look at some of the problems and solutions to problem stud mounting jobs for this month’s Shop Talk.

 

Over the years, we’ve done quite a number of these types jobs, installed on many different surfaces, and usually I do the installation myself, though sometimes with a helper. It seems to me, a somewhat cautious person when it comes to drilling dozens or even hundreds of holes in someone’s multi-million dollar building, that there are usually far more ways to screw up this type of job than there are ways to do them right.

 

 

 

The first thing that needs to be done right, if one is working with plate metal letters that are provided to the signmaker before they are drilled and tapped, is to do as good a job of the drilling tapping tasks as possible. Here’s the bad news, which I have mentioned once before: there in only one machine I know of that is really well suited for the task of drilling and tapping, and it is called a “Flex Arm,” made by a company of that name here in the USA.

 

If you don’t have one, and on occasion you have to drill and tap plate aluminum letters and logos by hand, you know how much work that is and how hard it is to get the tapping done to exacting standards. The “Flex Arm,” which is air powered, handles this chore very well with a very fine clutch control and instant push button reverse. It’s not cheap, but there really is, at least to my knowledge, nothing else like it.

 

Many jobs like this come to the signmaker already drilled and tapped for threads, but the next thing is producing an accurate pattern to take to the job site. Extreme care, of course, must be taken to line the letters up with a paper pattern. To perforate the holes in the pattern where the studs go, shorter temporary studs are used. These are made from cut off studs, pointed on a grinder, and made much shorter than the ones that will be used to actually install the letters and logos. The shorter the stud, the more accurate the pattern making will be. 

 

 

 

Having a very good pattern is essential, of course. And out on the job site, placing it in exactly the right position is life and death. The old carpenter’s adage, “measure twice, cut once” is hardly enough of an imperative. Measure twice, three times, and for good measure do it once more as well. Get back and look at the pattern before proceeding. Long ago but not forgotten, I once did most of a past job working from a “centerline” that I thought was the correct mark to follow, but was really was a previous mark two feet over from where I should have been. If I had backed up once and looked at that pattern I would have caught it, but instead proceeding to install the letters very accurately lined up with the wrong mark.

 

The first project we did at Region 7 was our interior letter job, stud mounted to a very rough rock wall. The wall was of some type of variegated rock, mostly limestone, but with a mixture of some much harder rock all through it. Drilling straight and true holes was most difficult. As always, I never want to drill a hole any larger than it has to be, but keeping the holes perfectly accurate on this unpredictable surface was hardly possible.

 

The final job looked simple enough, but in reality was a bit of a challenge because of the surface it was mounted to.

Corrections to letter placement, and on this job there were some, were accomplished by bending the 3" aluminum studs in ways that would correct the problem. One of the most important things we did before installing was to paint or powder coat the studs not to match the letters, but instead to match the wall. Since the letters and logo were installed offset from the wall an inch or so, and the studs needed to be as “invisible” as possible, they were done to match the wall. When studs are painted the color of the wall, any that are not really straight are hardly noticed. As much as this seems just common sense, most installs I see like this are done incorrectly, with the studs matching the letters.

 

Rough rock walls, especially made of limestone or a limestone mixture, are not my favorite because they are also brittle. On this job, when we were mostly done drilling our holes but still had the pattern in place, the job site supervisor walked by and saw the chunks of rock laying on the floor and was more than a bit anxious about what would be left of the wall once we removed our pattern. As has been the case before, this rough and irregular rock surface was still rough and irregular when we finished drilling, and perfectly fine. So, when this happens to you, just don’t panic. If necessary, I have before used silicone to glue an important chip of rock back in place, and this worked quite well.

 

All holes are blown clean of dust with compressed air and filled with clear silicone (or perhaps silicone that matches the wall) just prior to inserting the studs. Of course, first testing how all the letters fit first, without silicone, is a given as you don’t what to be throwing silicone around if you must go back and re-drill a hole or two.

 

After tweaking all of the studs and gluing all components in place, our interior job was finished, being careful that all elements were straight, level and well aligned against a wall that was anything but. 

 

 

 

Our outside job had its own challenges as well. The 12" tall letters that read, “Education Service Center” were to go on the front edge of the face board of a second story canopy or roof, which was later identified as structural beam made of steel ¼" thick. This meant the holes were going to be slow to drill, and really needed to be very accurate indeed. The large plate metal letters above, in fact all the exterior letters, were waterjet cut from ½" thick 6061 aluminum. The larger top line of 36" tall and 42" tall characters were to be mounted on a decorative structure above the roofline, the surface of which was a series of extruded aluminum slats. 

 

Each slat had only a ½"-wide flat surface for the studs (we used ¼" studs on these letters) to go through. In the shop we could have only guessed as to where the studs needed to be located on the backs of our letters, and guessing does not work for drilling holes in new buildings. So, we made thin (.040) aluminum duplications of the real plate metal letters, and merely clamped them in place on the wall before hand, drilled through them and through the slats, and then used them as perfectly accurate templates for drilling and tapping the backs of our plate metal powder coated letters. 

 

For jobs that go on irregular or unusual surfaces, where determining the stud location on the letter backs in advance is nearly impossible, this using of dummy letters as templates is a very good idea. You can make them, of course, by tracing around the real letters and cutting them out of cardboard of something inexpensive like that, but if you take some extra very thin material to your CNC cutting vendor (if that isn’t you), they can likely cut your pattern at the same time as they cut the real heavy-gauge copies, with little if any extra cost to you. Explain why you need them, and provide the thin substrate and you can get it all done at the some time easily enough.

 

Out on the job, the install could not have been much easier. We enlarged the holes in the slatted wall we drilled previously to 5/16" in diameter, and these large and heavy letters with ¼" studs slipped neatly into place. Nuts and washers were secured from behind and we were finished in a very short amount of time. 

 

Dropping down to the second row of letters, we started the install of those 12" tall letters which mounted on that painted steel beam I had mentioned. First, and most importantly, we located the center of our display on the building, and matched it to the exact center of our pattern, then checked and double checked this step. Using the fastest electric drill we owned, we drilled small 1/8" pilot holes through our pattern into the beam, and then drilled holes 1/32" over the size of our studs, which were 3/16". So, our final hole was 7/32", which provided little play. We left our pattern in place until we had tested that each letter fit perfectly and was level and straight.

 

Before these projects were done, we had drilled many, many holes in a brand new multi-million dollar building, with no errors and no real problems. Errors on jobs like these are errors a signmaker/installer cannot afford.

The letters mounted offset from the wall ½", with nuts on the studs holding them the correct distance and giving us a bit more surface for our silicone to bond to. The drilling took a couple of hours of hard work, but setting the letters in place did not take long. The accuracy of our pattern, which was very important, certainly paid off.

 

Nothing, on either of these jobs, could be left to chance, and nothing was. To provide our client with the job we promised, we took our time to check our work, make templates when needed and made sure we double-checked everything as we went. Problem installs like these are not really very difficult, but only take diligence they deserve to go well without any disasters, making the life of a signmaker and installer a little less stressful.