Sign Shop

I've avoided politics in my postings here. I never expected life with a 7900 would have anything to do with that, and it doesn't. But life in the U.S. (and around the world to various degrees) has been, uh, interesting these last 429 days. My wife (Pat) and I are quite liberal in our attitudes and approach to life in general; living in Montana, overall a very conservative state, has sometimes been frustrating. We didn't come here to be annoyed by our Republican neighbors and generally angry all the time, so we aren't, in spite of news reporting that makes it seem most of this country is.

Back in January Pat asked me to make some signs for a local (Kalispell, about 60 miles/97 km north of home) version of a nation-wide 'Women's March.' I'd made signs for a climate march we attended in Missoula in March, 2017. I printed those on Epson Luster (24 inch roll) and attached the prints to sheets of quarter-inch foam core. This worked out well, and the signs looked great for minimal cost. I thought they were much nicer than hand-lettered signs on poster-board, the kind of things commonly seen at these sorts of events.

Signs I printed for a local version of the nation-wide Women's March

And just like that I became a sign shop. Since that climate march a year ago I've made signs for the Women's March mentioned above, and last week made another pair for the 'March For Our Lives' held in cities around the world yesterday.

The message may be serious, but the signs are fun to make. Pat and I will kick around ideas, or she'll make up or find a slogan she likes. I'll dig around the Web looking for clip-art or other appropriate images I can legally use. I often modify them, changing colors, filling in areas, vignetting the image, etc. to best suit my design and the slogan of the sign. Often the images are small jpegs, which must be enlarged by orders of magnitude to accommodate my design. You'd expect these to look terrible, but the results are often surprisingly good.

Printing these signs is done the same as any other job. I size the image as needed for the sign, complete the design work, set up the printer with a 24-inch roll of luster, and then print. The prints are then cut to fit the foam core, which has been stapled to the yardstick handles. A spray adhesive is used to attach the print to the foam core.

 
The signs above, for yesterday's March For Our Lives, were made in the same way. I printed the nozzle check as usual, and then printed the larger sign, which looks as expected. About a half hour later I printed the smaller sign. I could see as soon as that print started to emerge from the printer that the color in the cow manure photo was way off. As this is a non-critical application I let the print finish. I then did another nozzle check and found the entire LK pattern had gone missing. It's not common, but also not unheard of for a channel to disappear in the middle of a print job; this was one of those cases.

When I got the 7900, and its Canon predecessor, I never imagined I'd print things like this. I don't plan to do it for anyone other than Pat. Making these things provides another opportunity to run the printer during slow periods.

  --Jay