Sign shop keeps Team Malmstrom headed in right direction

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Cortney Paxton
  • 341st Missile Wing Public Affairs
MALMSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, Mont. --  Getting lost is sometimes inevitable and can happen to anyone. When it comes to those stubborn Airmen too proud to ask for directions, there's a resource that they can turn to - signs.

Malmstrom Air Force Base is full of brown painted signs offering directional guidance, building information or reserved parking. These signs go through layout and painting stages done by two very dedicated civilians in the 341st Civil Engineer Squadron's sign shop before they are stood up along the streets on base.

Dave Chandler and Cliff Holmes, both members of the 341st CES sign shop, spend good portions of their days creating the familiar brown metal markings strategically placed around Malmstrom.

"The signs on base have to be changed when they wear out from too much sun or weather exposure," Chandler said. "Our main job is to reprint new signs. The signs that you see out in front of all the dormitories and most of the other buildings on base we print. They usually say the building number, what it is - what's housed in that building - and the street address."

Chandler and Holmes operate the Gerber Solara Ionx, a $90,000 machine that paints each sign, computer layout systems and two vinyl machines. The Ionx has only been operational in the sign shop for six months and has significantly improved the timeliness of creating signs.

"We didn't always have this nice big printing machine; we just used the two vinyl machines," Chandler said. "If we were to do a (larger, directional) sign it would easily take us two days to do it and you would have two people working on that sign for two days. Today we picked up one just before lunch time... and we'll have that back up before two o'clock."

According to Holmes, the Ionx has to be cleaned after every three to four printing jobs to avoid imperfections and unevenly distributed ink, but also mentioned that the cleaning is worth the time the machine saves them.

Each sign created on base has specific dimensions, fonts and wording, and may seem redundant to create, but each one is meticulously laid out and created to support the members of Team Malmstrom.

"We don't want people feeling lost," Chandler said.