Stone Signage

November 5, 2002

By Terri Chance

For plenty of fabricators, stone and signage added up to one product: monuments. For a growing number of vendors in the market – including sign professionals – a sign is anything but an enlarged headstone.
Just as competitive prices make standard stone products such as countertops and flooring more attractive to homebuyers, putting the company name in stone is drawing more business clients.
What’s important to those sign buyers is how the piece represents a company – and the image it projects of success. It’s the exclusivity of the look that sells – even if the price isn’t top-dollar.

MATTER OF COST
Some fabricators, of course, have long-time relationships with sign companies for taking work on a per-job basis. Other stone shops, though, may wonder if it’s worth the bother, given the somewhat old-fashioned notion that signs are generally just wood and paint.
But, says David Harding, owner of A Sign of Excellence in Carrollton, Texas, stone signs aren’t as expensive as the customer – or the fabricator offering work – might fear. The slab granite that’s being offered, unworked, for $5 to $18 ft² is cheaper, he says, than redwood. In fact, it’s often less than the treated plywood used by some sign artisans to paint a replica of a stone piece.
Harding purchases a variety of slabs from all over the world, already polished, and works with a local stone mason for use in products such as residential-development and church signage. And while he works with many different types of stones, including limestone and marble, he prefers granite.
“Because we use a lot of gold leaf on our stones,” he says, “I generally stick with darker color granites.”
He gets both blue pearl and emerald pearl granite from the same mountain in Norway. Many of the blacks and brown granites he buys come from Zimbabwe, India and China, along with Italian white marble.
Harding doesn’t opt for simple etch work, either. Most of the signage he’s producing involves sandlblasting text and other graphic elements, and then either painting or gold-leafing the blasted areas. He’s also found two waterjet-production companies within five miles of his Dallas-area shop, and uses the precision-cut stone for inlays and individual letters/logos for corporate ID signage.
“Everybody has brass letters on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk at a company,” Harding says. “I can use waterjet and do the same signage in granite for about the same cost, and you don’t have to keep polishing the granite like you would the brass.

IT’S A BLAST
For most work, however, Harding prefers sandblasting to any other form of marking and shaping the stone. A CNC machine – or a waterjet – would be too costly for his smaller shop to bring in-house. Besides, he adds, learning to sandblast isn’t that difficult for an employee.
“Sandblasting is the most economical, and routing gets into the cost factor,” says Richard Merlau, president of Valders Stone & Marble in Valders, Wis. “Sandblasting is done so precisely that you get the same effect at a much lower cost. So, there’s no compelling reason to do it with a router,”
Valders sits at the opposite end of the scale from Harding’s small sign shop. Besides fabricating, Valders also owns seven quarries, so it’s rolling through the whole workflow from initial slab cuts to finished product.
Merlau says the usual order is for polishing and shaping slabs, engraving text via sandblasting, and shipping the sign directly to site. Valders will also take job work for sign makers to sandblast the graphics, but Merlau adds “We really prefer to do the entire custom sign ourselves and ship a finished product.”
Like most large fabricators, Valders Stone works mainly to provide stone for commercial buildings and large landscaping work. In fact, the sign portion of the business makes up only about three percent to four percent of its sales volume, but it’s still welcome business.
Even with the small percentage play, “that’s still a pretty high number because when you do a courthouse where the stone work is worth several million dollars,” Merlau says. “That tends to dominate your percentage of sales.”
Valders also thinks big on size; Merlau notes one monument sign used panels measuring 16′ high and 36′ long, with 5’-tall sandblasted text. Not surprisingly, Valders clad the panels to the rest of the sign structure.
“That had 2”-thick slabs,” he says.

STONE TO GO?
While Harding and Merlau are busy with stone in their shops everyday, Rob Conover’s doing something different in northern California.
Conover left his walk-in shop in an urban area and moved his entire operation up to Quincy, Calif., in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains to fabricate work for his company, Sandstorm Signs. Instead of always shipping the stone to his mountain location, however, he’s made it a point ot fabricate on-site with most jobs.
Sandstorm Signs produces identification signage for doctors and lawyers, and wayfinding graphics for golf courses using native stones.
If possible, he’ll use stone from the surrounding area to compliment the surroundings of his business customer. If he can’t find any nearby, he’ll purchase stones that match the environment from a local quarry.
For instance, he explains that sandstone matches a desert environment, granite will compliment a mountain location, and lava will match some type of Hawaiian setting.
He says it’s more fun and much more interesting to work with natural or native stone because he never knows what he’s going to get. It’s tricky because each one’s going to be different. You never know if it’s going to be hard as diamonds or as soft as dust.”
Providing signs for many golf courses in and around northern California, Sandstorm Signs tries to use stone from right off the grounds, from pieces exposed during the construction of the course. His forte, Conover says, is handpicking the stones so the message conveyed will match the character of stone itself.
On stones that come right from the job site, faces bearing any image have to be smoothed and flattened in order to hold the mask used in sandblasting. The entire fabrication of the stone is done right on site, according to Conover, especially if it’s a big.
“If the client has all these beautiful stones that weigh two tons each and wants them carved, what are we going to do?” he asks. “Ship them to our shop, carve them, and then ship them back? This way saves the client money.”
After sandblasting the lettering or image from the stone, he’ll add dye, or what Conover calls coloring the stone. The tinted solution, poured into the letters or graphics, is absorbed into the porous material and becomes part of the stone.
Conover used to be a conventional sign maker, using wood for most of his golf-course jobs. But because wood eventually deteriorates, he decided he wanted to find another material that was a natural, aesthetically pleasing sign that didn’t need maintenance.
“This material is already a million years old,” he says, “and still holds up.”
Terri Chance is a freelance writer and editor in Broomfield, Colo.