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During the Troup County Board of Commissioners work session on Tuesday morning, County Engineer James Emery gave a presentation regarding upgrades to the county’s sign making equipment.

Recently purchased sign-making equipment will change how the county goes about creating signs entirely. The new equipment is able to print and cut color images on vinyl to be placed on road signs, temporary signs and county vehicles.

The commissioners approved the purchase of a 54-inch Roland TrueVIS Printer/Cutter at a cost of $17,495 and a 55-inch Royal Sovereign Cold Laminator at a cost of $5,295 from Mac Papers + Packaging out of Jacksonville, Florida during their May 17 board meeting.

Emery said they also recently remodeled the sign shop to create a clean room for the new equipment with an air purifier to separate it from the other work areas. A walkway and stairs were also extended to make use of the space above the newly-enclosed area for storage.

One the first projects for the new equipment was to update the county’s fleet of vehicles with their new multi-colored logo. 

Previously, when the county wanted to create a traffic sign, they would cut reflective background vinyl to fit the sign and then cut sign markings to stick on top from a different vinyl roll. 

This creates a lot of waste since only the cut areas of the symbols are used and all of the excess vinyl needs to be removed from the final sign.

Now the county can print directly on the reflective background, eliminating the need for the second vinyl and the waste it creates.

“This is a huge upgrade in the efficiency of our system,” Emery said.

The printed signs should last just as long as the regular signs once they are laminated, he said.

“The printed media would not last as long if we did not put lamination over it,” explained Emery. “The lamination provides UV protection. We do laminate all the new signs at this point.”

The new printer allows the sign shop to create a wider variety of signs.

“Any image that you send us we can put it on a whole variety of different kinds of media and produce signs with it,” said Emery, showing a photographic quality image that was placed on a piece of used coroplast sign board.

Emery also shared some other potential use for the new sign making equipment.

“With this new equipment, we want to potentially change the way we do our road name signs,” Emery said.

Two new road sign designs were presented that show off the county’s new logo, similar to the road signs recently created by the City of LaGrange.

“We can incorporate the new logo in a monochrome standard blue and white or in full color,” Emery said.