Lake Monster Brewery - Backlit Sign

This…now this was a project that was an absolute labor of love. Lake Monster Brewing, if you’ve never been, is a wonderful brewery in St. Paul Mn, located off of vandalia in a rad industrial building that, once upon a time, was a mattress factory. This twin cities brewery has, for years, been a frequen haunt of mine; I was elated to get the opportunity to have my metalwork in their taproom. As always, with CNC projects, step one was design…usually I have a vector drawing to work off of…for this one, I had a business card. So what did I do? Naturally, I took a photo with my phone and traced it in Adobe Illustrator.

All-in-all, the replication of the imagery wasn’t difficult at all, and I was able to have the CNC cut file done, and the steel plasma cut in the same 3 hour window. I was engineering and making decisions on the fly with this sign. Normally, as I have with my past back lit signs, I will drill through each piece of metal and run a bolt through to mount it to the sign backing, but the aesthetic of hex-head bolts peppered throughout the piece simply did not work with the aesthetic I wanted to achieve with this sign…on top of that, the overall size of the sign was too large for me to be able to cut with my CNC plasma in one piece, so I had a couple of problems to work out here. As far as the backing goes, I just clamped everything town as a stencil and ran the plasma cutter by hand.

I’d challenge just about anyone to point this backer out as having been cut by hand…sure, I ruined three pieces of steel before I got the final successful piece, but hey, success is success. The only problem left was to figure out how I was going to actually attach the steel lettering to the backer without leaving a bunch of exposed bolt or stud heads. This was a simple problem, at the end of the day, and simple problems are often best solved by simple solutions. I operated with my usual process - drilling through the lettering and the steel backing for a bolt pass-through, only instead of running the bolt from top to bottom, I bolted only to the backing, set the letters on top, and ran a plug weld through the top-most bolt hole…the picture below shows what I mean.

So, instead of a big visible bolt head, I had a little weld point that was easily grinded flat and pretty. With that, all that was left was the fun part: paint and wire up the LED lights, and that’s a wrap. This sign is currently hanging in Lake Monster’s taproom - go take a look, and while you’re there, have a few delicious pints eh?