Litchfield Township, Ohio is a small town of 3,250 people located just south of Cleveland. When community officials wanted to replace four long-standing “welcome to” post-and-panel signs, three generations of sign makers worked together to make this request a reality, and in the process, a very special Father’s Day.
Chris Eppolito is a third-generation sign maker and the owner of Eppolito Signs in nearby Medina, Ohio. Eppolito moved his residence to Litchfield Township last year and recently stopped by the town’s Service Department to talk with them about having his front ditch re-dug for drainage.
However this conversation soon turned to signage.
“They mentioned that their signs were in bad shape and needed replacing,” says Eppolito, noting that the weathered and faded sign panels in question were mounted between six-by-six posts that were still in good shape. “However the posts had been up for over ten years, so none of them were perfectly straight anymore.”
One of Eppolito’s focuses is in “sign restoration,” and as often as he can, he likes to give the customer the option to restore their existing sign—“providing that it’s in good shape,” he says.
According to Eppolito, the main goal of this project was to find a cost-effective way to update and replace all four signs entering Litchfield Township, so he decided to only repaint the posts and replace the four sign panels. This update would be an affordable method compared to a total replacement.
The previous sign design featured only a “boring” tree at the top, so Eppolito took the opportunity to “spruce” up this look. One of the community’s most prominent landmarks is a gazebo that sits in the middle of town, so he incorporated this image into the new design instead.
For back up, he provided town officials a few other sketches of different design ideas. “However after a meeting with all the members, they picked the sketch with the gazebo,” says Eppolito, “which also happened to be the one I liked the best.”
He built the new sign panels using aluminum-covered plywood. Basic tools and materials were used to fabricate these signs. The panels were all cut out using a circular saw and a jig saw, while the die-cut lettering and the gazebo image were made out of cast vinyl.
After cutting the signs out and sanding them on the first day, Eppolito sealed all the edges and capped them off with edge-cap via silicone adhesive the next day. Then he applied the vinyl.
Eppolito also had to make custom aluminum brackets to retrofit the new signs between the existing posts. Using a shear and brake, he sheared each piece of pre-painted .063 white aluminum to size and then bent them on a 90-degree angle and mounted them to each side of the signs (four brackets per sign). Each bracket was thru-bolted using stainless steel.
“The signs couldn’t have fit better,” says Eppolito. “The aluminum brackets had some ‘give’ to them and mounted perfectly flush to the posts.”
As mentioned earlier, signage literally runs through Eppolito’s bloodlines. In fact, Chris’s late grandfather Sam Eppolito, Sr., started this business some sixty years ago. Today Eppolito’s father, Sam, is a semi-retired sign painter. “However he is always offering to help with any painting or installation,” he says.
Meanwhile Eppolito’s son Michael, 17, daughter Alyssa, 13, and son Christian, 8, are all showing signs of interest in someday taking over the business.
Everyone pitched in to handle the smooth installation of these four 32-inch-tall-by-72-inch-wide signs. Two signs are currently located on Route 18 (the east and west entrances to Litchfield Township), and the other two are on Route 83 (north and south entrances).
Eppolito placed the signs in the bed of his truck for the ride from the shop to the install site, placing cardboard between them for added protection.
Chris Eppolito and his son Michael did most of the removals and lifting, while his father Sam did much of the painting and was in charge of the leveling. His son Christian re-painted the posts with white exterior enamel paint out at the job install site.
Some of the signs were located on lawns and some in fields off the road. “We took a weed-trimmer with us to trim around each post before painting was done,” says Eppolito.
The biggest challenge was to fit each sign between the existing posts. “Since the posts had been up for over ten years, they had all moved slightly and were not perfectly straight,” says Eppolito. “We cut each sign differently, to match the differences between the posts. The signs were marked per their location and installed accordingly.
“As I mentioned earlier, the slight ‘give’ in the aluminum brackets was enough to make up for any differences in the posts. They fit like a glove.”
Judging from the success of this family affair, it may be surprising to learn that the original plan actually didn’t involve the multiple generations working on this sign project. Instead it was a night-before-Father’s Day call from Chris’s father that sparked the team effort. Eppolito says, “My [dad] called me and asked, ‘Why don’t we install the signs tomorrow on Father’s Day?’ I really liked that idea.
That Sunday ended up being the nicest day of the week, after rainfall each of the other days. “We needed a good day for the install and painting,” says Eppolito, “so it turned out to be an even better Father’s Day.”
By Jeff Wooten
All photos: Eppolito Signs.
