Featured Project: A Sign to Serve as a Beacon

This featured project comes to us from right here in SDG‘s backyard. John Dobie started the Broomfield Sign Co. in 1999, named after the city in Colorado that is also home to National Business Media, SDG‘s parent company.

The company grew quickly and in 2004 Dobie changed the name to BSC Signs, to more accurately reflect the company’s broader geographic focus. Today the majority of the company’s work is still in Colorado and southern Wyoming, although it is certainly not limited in any way, be it in skill or capacity.

This project was done for Centura Health, owner of the St. Anthony North Health Campus at the busy intersection of 144th Ave. and Interstate 25 in Westminster, just north of Denver. St. Anthony North has a level III Trauma Center and offers emergency services 24/7, and the large campus needed a sign that would help people quickly locate the emergency department and trauma center, day or night.

The company says the channel letters it built were some of the largest it has fabricated in recent memory. They’re about 5′ tall and 5″ deep, and the completed sign is 42′ wide. The company says the faces were precision-cut from sheets of translucent red acrylic and each letter has bright red LEDs inside.

On installation day, BSC’s installation team used a two-man lift to reach the old sign, 60′ up, and disconnected the power and removed it in sections. The new 5′-high letters were first mounted to three raceways that were then hoisted up and attached to custom-made brackets on the wall. The raceways not only keep the wires out of the weather but the brackets mean fewer touch points on the wall and a cleaner look.

“Even with three raceways,” the company wrote on its blog on the website, “the oversized letters made for a challenging installation.”