How It's Made: Midway Sign Company offers in

CHILLICOTHE— Looking for a sign? Midway Sign Company's contributions to Chillicothe can't be missed with signs, awnings and banners lining the streets.

Since officially opening its doors in2020,Midway has had a hand in creating many iconic signs, including Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop, Roosters and the directional wayfinding signs downtown.

Despite their variety of offerings, Midway does everything in-house from printing to painting to welding.

Co-owners Jarrod DePugh and Chad McAllister said the sign-making process is not as easy as it seems.

"When we do a sign downtown, a lot of people don't realize that it's a complicated process," McAllister said. "It's not something that can happen immediately."

In addition to the building full of technology, the business runs on designers, welders, painters and more to get the job done. DePugh said Midway is full of artists and storytellers.

"We want to do good work... Maybe if that wasn't so important to us we'd have a lot more money right now," DePugh said. "The whole point of this whole thing was there was just so much bad design and we really wanted to impact that here locally."

The design process varies widely on the client's needs. Some clients come to Midway with a logo and colors already decided and prepared, while others want to start from scratch. Either way, the Midway team is ready to handle the job.

Depending on the type of sign and the location, Midway may need to get a permit and approval for the design before it is installed, adding another layer of difficulty to the project.

The business works on several projects at a time, all at different stages of completion depending on the needs of each sign. One main project in recent weeks has been for Graham's Greens, an urban farm in Chillicothe. The owner provided the designs for the sign, so McAllister only tweaked the design to get it ready for the process.

The material for the sign is high-density urethane, or HDU, a dense but lightweight material used for making signs that lasts longer than wood.

An industrial-sized CNC router is a computer-controlled cutting machine that can make precise cuts to HDU on an XYZ axis system. After uploading and tweaking the design, McAllister creates a cut file to communicate to the computer how deep to cut into the HDU.

A giant vacuum pulls the HDU board towards the table to keep the board in place while the router works. The router moves back and forth on top of the HDU, similar to a traditional printer, and cuts into the board to make the outlines of the design.

For the Graham's Greens sign, the router cut the business name and the logo to give dimension to the project.

When the router finishes the cut, it's time for paint.

The design of the sign is black with white and green details. Midway can custom-match paint in-store to match any paint color. A color matching tool acts as a camera to capture an existing color. From there, the tool creates a code that allows Drew Williston, Midway Sign Company production coordinator, to mix the exact paint color by hand.

Using a paint container on a scale, Williston measures out the paint components by hand before shaking the canister to the perfect color.

The black background is spray-painted onto the entire sign, making sure to cover every crevice in the sign, including the edges of each letter. The white and green details were carefully hand-painted on top of each letter with a paintbrush or hand roller.

With every phase of the design process, Williston said the sign took about six employees to make and about three months to complete.

Installing the sign can be its own challenge when having to deal with obstacles such as traffic, trees and fire hydrants, but seeing the completed project come to life is what keeps Midway going.

How It's Made is a series highlighting unique products and services in Chillicothe and Ross County. If you have a suggestion for a future business to feature, email Megan at [email protected].