i applied vinyl and made another trip to install said sign faces.

what the hell???
the signface size was 70" and i was short 5" on either side!

what do i do.. i stop all other production and order 2 more sign faces the correct size, letter and install within 4 hours.

whose fault?... mine!
what does this tell you?

i am a man of my word and things will be right.

come on people, tell me your biggest screw-up.
(it will make me feel better )

I built a theme park on the wrong property once.

NOT!

You're still one of my my heroes.

Just think..... another sample for the wall of your shop.

that really makes me feel a lot better. heeeheeeeheee

come on dan, i am sure you can relate a faux paux that you have made during your many years of experience....

Probably my biggest sign "Faux Paux" was also my biggest spelling mistake Don't we all have those too?

Had to write our city name across the top of the hanger doors at the local airport. 6ft high lettering and umpteeen feet long. Needed a mobile platform to reach that high. Marked it out to scale with chalk and wondered why I was about 6ft out one end off centre! Can't see chalk marks from the ground.

Got to painting the "B" in "TOOWOOMBA" and noticed I was one "O" short!!!!! hahahahhaha

This is the biggest I can remember right now though, a few years ago a local rent-a-car franchise got a plexiglas backlit sign face provided by their corporate office. They didn't want a lighted cabinet though, they wanted it mounted to their office trailer with a wood frame. I was sliding it into the frame I mounted to receive it when the manager said he wanted it screwed through the frame into the wall itself, not just slid into the frame. I didn't drill oversize holes to allow for expansion & contraction. It cracked big time all over the place. I did the re-install free, but luckily the managers involvement helped to get the replacement sign from Corporate again for free.

My girlfriend did a good one on my first electrical sign. I spent forever on building & painting & wiring the cabinet. Then came the slightly easier part I was more experienced in, the vinyl sign face. It was a solid translucent blue background with the letters knocked out to show white. I special ordered just enough material to do a 30" x 12' sign in one pc. w/ no seams. I had to arrange with a competitor & former employer to cut it on his 24" plotter. Even though it only cut up to 24" his SummaGraphics had room to run the 30" pc through it, so we got the thing to track straight, and center the lettering. I brought it back to my shop to reverse weed it and Linda offered to help. She grabbed a blade and cut the background right between two letters to weed out the background in sections. I caught her after about a 12" cut before she pulled up any vinyl. I had to install this finest achievement yet with a 12" razor thin light leak. The client closed every day at 5 pm, and never said anything about it. I couldn't bear to drive by it at night.

[ November 03, 2001: Message edited by: Doug Allan ]

At the time I lived in Sacramento...maybe an hour or so away.

It was over a hundred and ten degrees that day, did a life size chevy type car on the window (reflections in the baby moons and all) and on the other side of the shop, painted in real big letters, magenta flouresant, top coated with Varethane to protect it for a few years.."OPEN SUNDAYS"

The owners came out to admire the finished job...everyone loved it...all the mechanics admired it.....I was real proud of myself too!
Having done such a good job, especially under the intense heat...and everyone was so happy! I was happy, we were all happy!

I collected my check and home I went to soak my head in ice tea...happy, happy, happy

Two weeks later........(dun dun dun!)

Owner lady calls.."You spelled 'SUNDAYS' wrong"

'Huh'?

"You spelled 'SUNDAYS' wrong"

"How"!!??

"You spelled it...'SUDAYS'!

I thought she was joking....but she wasn't, she was a bit perturbed...and i had to go back and scrape the now compleatly hardened, Varethane coated window off and redo it.

Adrienne

"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bulls*#@!"

[ November 03, 2001: Message edited by: AdrienneMorgan ]

Here's another
My buddy Ron (a helluva sign guy,BTW)lands a 12x16 board to reface. We know the size 'cause we went out and counted the 4x8 panels in the old sign. this is a V-panel, 6 panels per face. We get to the location, new panels on the trailer, as we remove the first old panel I realize the dam thing ain't 4' wide!
Every panel on that face was3'x7'
nuttin to do but head back to Ronnie's and cut the new sign down to size, block it out and repaint.

And on Friday I went back and applied 4' by 20' of white translucent vinyl to the back of two faces on a sign I did this year. We made the sign with faces that have a cream trans. background with green letters. Trouble was we started with clear plex and the shadows of the interior posts showed through. Had to add $250 in white to the back, hopefully to diffuse the light better.

[ November 03, 2001: Message edited by: David Wright ]

THere was this one time a few years ago...

made a huge teddy bear for a Christmas display along with a bunch of other oversize toys. He was 12 feet tall sitting down. First we had a real tough time fitting him into the mall. I guess I kinda measured the doors a little wrong. Trouble was he was HEAVY! (like 500 lbs).

I thought we were going to have to remove some body parts and then reattach them later, but we did get him in eventually. I should have known at that point the job wasn't going to go smoothly.

We set him up and were real proud of ourselves... then the critics started showing up. A series of folks from the mall got into the act, and we ended up spending a whole bunch of money on a ramp we didn't count on. That got sorted out and all was well until Santa showed up. He decided that the office chair we had grafted into the bear's leg was too small for him to be comfortable. A big discussion went on with the mall being happy and Santa not. Trouble was that it happened one party at a time and not when everybody was there at once. (over a period of three days) Santa came back and laid into me about this substandard sized chair one too many times. So I removed it. My crew gave me LOTS OF ROOM while i turned BEET RED and proceeded to rip it off the bear with my bare hands and by jumping on it substancially. I didn't say any bad words, but I did get the job done.

Word soon spread back to the mall office that I had done some renovating on the bear. THey told me to ignore Santa and put the chair back. Trouble was the chair didn't come off in one piece if you know what I mean. I had to go out and spend $150 bucks to purchase a second chair.

Santa didn't bother me any more (I did get a lump of coal that year in my stocking however) and the mall was happy with the display.

My crew still bugs me from time to time, and their version of events is somewhat different from mine Some people just exadurate so MUCH!!

My worst was when I had a set of airfoil type spoilers for the top of semi tractors. Dark green background, white lettering with black outline and shade with medium/light green pinstripe around that and a pinstriped border in the same color around the perimeter of the spoiler.

These were a real bugger to letter with the swoop in the spoiler and all not to mention the double coating and all.

I got them all done and delivered them to the trucking company. The manager loved them, the owner loved them, everyone loved them, except for the lead service guy. Seems I painted them upside down. Doh!

After cleaning the lettering off and having to have them re-sprayed.... lost my heiney on that one. Lost the client, too. Bummer...

Here's one that happened kind of like yours but a bit reversed...

A restaurant that I used to eat at frequently with my parents (they have sinced closed... whether by poor economics or by order of the health department is still unclear) called and wanted a quote on doing a sign face for an existing sign cabinet.

I loaded the ladder into the van, went down to the location, and climbed up on top of the overhang on the building to measure the sign. The sign face measured 38" tall and 24' 3" long. How anyone built a sign with those dimensions, I will never know... The 70's must have been really good to them. LOL!

The sign face was also corrogated plastic. Sheesh, they should have outlawed that crap years before... But anyways...

I figured that a flat sign face with a square tubing frame behind the face would work out well. I wrote up the estimate and put on the quote that the size was approximately 3' x 24' instead of putting down the exact dimensions.

hey, i figured I went up there and got the exact dimensions, why should I make it easy for them to shop my quote all over town... I also didn't mention the frame in the quote and just worked it into the final price. i also quoted for a one piece face.

Well, we didn't get the job. The next time I was in there to eat witn Mom and Pop, the owner came up to me and was absolutely outraged that I would quote her a sign face with the wrong dimensions.

Seems that the schmucks that did the job just went off my quote and didn't bother to go up and look at the job at all. The sign face was done in three seperate pieces without any glue strips or h-bars holding them together. Hahahahahahahaha!

This was not to mention that the sign face(s) were three inches to short on length and only had about a half inch of plastic holding it into the top retainer. What was the killer was that the face didn't have a spacer behind it and the installers had screwed it to the retainers every couple of feet or so and was starting to get the "pucker" look from being tightly screwed in.

What a cob job! I especially loved the cracks of light coming through the seams for added visual appeal. LOL!

So, the owner starts really beefing at me that her sign looks so bad. I told her that her beef lied with the goofs that did the sign. She told me that they were blaming me for giving them wrong dimensions and failing to mention the need for spacers... Like it was my fault that they were just too darn lazy to go up and measure the sign for themselves... LOL! Not!

This is not even mentioning that the fact that the corrogated plastic was just way too obvious. Sheesh... So, when she asks me what can be done to make the sign right for her, I told her to go back to the guys that did it or replace it with the right one. She said they wouldn't do anything about it and she couldn't afford to re-do the sign. I told her that was a shame.

I drove by about two weeks later and noticed that someone had pop riveted a extra piece of plastic to the end of one of the panels. That was just the finishing touch that sign needed.

Moral of the story? Measure it yourself and don't rely on just someone else's written estimates.

I think our customers trust us too much....they often do not check the proofs closely enough...we make spelling mistakes too ya know.

I complete the work, whip the bill out and.........."You've got us starting at 9am, we start at 8.30am, and our phone number is 5 8,not 8 8" You will just have to fix it before I pay you and she gives an evil laugh.

My heart drops, I was counting on a clean get away, all the way back to the shop I'm whipping myself......"You #%^*@!!! idiot Clark, why the hell didn't ya read the job sheet!!! etc. etc.

Well, Imagine my surprise when I found that I had duplicated the specs EXACTLY as I had been given, all the typos were theirs....NA NA NA NA ............How do you spell RASBERRY!!!!!?

5 pre-existing walls, all aluminum I subbed out. 27" 'S' and all letters have a 1" return. Sprayed two sets with Imron automotive gold.

Get to the first wall and the letters are too long. Seems I used the logo that I already had from previous (smaller) jobs, but when I scaled it out, I measured the height instead of the legnth. Got all five walls lettered (finally) and broke even. Would have made a sweet 5 grand on that one.

Here's one finished wall...