Today’s podcast guest is Jon Odom, Founder and President of Productivity Fabricators, a family owned and operated steel fabricating business in Richmond, Indiana. John talks talks about how to design and maintain your billboard structures.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:59 — 24.9MB)
Give an overview of productivity fabricators.
Productivity Fabricators came into being January 1, 1994. I had worked for the previous owner for 8 years as the general manager and he decided to retire and gave me the opportunity to buy the business…The previous owner got into building sign structures for 3M advertising. That was our first customer and for the first few years they were our biggest customer.
A mistake companies make when designing billboards
What I see a lot with sign structures is there’s not a lot of consideration being given to being able to work on that structure. We design structures so that they can be accessed…the ladder comes up and comes to a walkway or access platform so that the guys can safely transfer from the column ladder to the head structure. I see a lot of them that aren’t that way. Guys have to jump or step further than they should.
What’s the most difficult out of home build you’ve ever done?
A few years ago we converted a roof built structure to a monopole. That was quite a challenge. The sign itself was built on a row house…a three story structure and the sign had beams that ran across from wall to wall and then there was a 20’ by 60’ face on top of that…The row house was burned out by a vagrant and was condemned and was going to have to come down…What we ended up doing was filling the basement with concrete and putting a bolt cage in there and then dropping a monopole down through the burned out roof. Then we took a horizontal pipe, a torsion pipe, and welded it to the cross beams and patched it to the column…and they knocked the building down and the sign still stood up.
What are the elements of a good out of home maintenance program.
The biggest challenge is to make sure that you inspect it regularly. I lot of things can happen to a sign structure from the elements – the wind and the rain, snow and ice…
When you send a guy out to inspect the sign he should have a document that tells him what to inspect. We’ve found that the best way to do that is to ask questions…that done regularly. We recommend once a year at least…or if you’ve had a big storm that’s a good time to go our and make sure that the head bolts have not stretched…
By the way if you find any bad bolts or loose bolts don’t just tighten them, replace them…once that bolt is stretched it’s not nearly as strong as it should be.
The biggest thing that affects signs is rust. If you find any rust on your sign structures it’s the time to give it a good sanding and repaint.
Fertilizer corrodes steel.
We had a customer call us and say that the tenant at this restaurant was complaining that he thought he saw the sign moving in the wind. We went out and looked at it and…we found that it was on a bolt cage and the bolt cage was buried and they decided to improve the looks of the property so they built a flower bed around this sign and the bolt cage was under about 2’ of dirt. Well, you know how flowers grow. You fertilize them with calcium and that kind of stuff. That just ate up those bolts and that bolt cage. We had to dig it all out and see what was going on. If I remember right there were about 10 bolts on that bolt cage and only 2-3 bolts were holding the sign up.
Keep the base of your signs clear
We always recommend on any new installations that you bring the concrete up above the dirt level and slope the concrete away from the pipe…Try to get it up so that any of the moisture or water that become present flows away from that pipe and keep the dirt away from it.
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