We’re all pumped because it’s football season and fingers crossed that our NY teams do well. We had the privilege of doing some signage and graphics at MetLife Stadium before the season started. Check it out!
Well my job is done for awhile. I’ve designed and cut the sign. Now it’s Brians turn to work some magic in the paint shop. He’ll prep, prime and paint then assemble.
Now it’s time for a little detail and adding the color.
Great job Brian – Here are the signs ready to install. Stay tuned for the final install shots…
– Steve
The CNC Stage is here – we have all of our files designed and they fit together (on the computer) and we’ve added the textures – we are ready to lay down our precision board HDU on the MultiCam 3000 CNC to start cutting.
We started with the letters for the sign first – these were the easiest cuts so we got them out of the way and right over to paint shop.
On to the heavy 3D cuts of the terrain below the tracks. we took a leap and decided to cut every part separately starting with the terrain, then railroad ties then the rails. this would allow us to build up the base for a realistic look and also give us the flexibitliy to paint the elements separately.
We’ve cut the ties and they’re looking really good. The detail on this sign will be insane – and alot of fun to look at from up close. after some quick calculations we’ve realized the sign will be 32 feet long!
So we have our terraine, our ties and our tracks we’ve cut all of the letters and it all fits together. So we’re done! Oh wait – the trains….
I’ll back up a bit. we started here – I brought my 3D Source file into Enroute Pro – did some scaling magic on it and created my cut files. Because we are working with 2″ Precision Board HDU I had to slice it into 3 layers – per side! Yes thats right – each engine is 6 layers of 2″ foam.
We cut each layer seprately then during the assembly process glued them together.
So here is two of the slices -this is when it gets exciting. We’ll now cut the other side of the engine and piece it all together.
After several hours of sanding, cutting and assembly Brian has the two train engines ready for primer! Onto the Tender cars.
The tender cars were pretty simple cuts made from two layers of 2″ HDU glued together. The tenders cars are key elements of the sign and will allow us to add some real nice details once we start painting.
Another fun little detail is the coal on the tender car. Here i’m hand carving the basic shape then Brian will add another layer of detail and off to the paint shop for Mark and Brian to work some magic.