 Welcome, first of all, to the main charitable mechanics hall. I'm Megan Reedy, a member of the main charitable mechanics. I do make some things. I sew stuff and I do some paper stuff, calligraphy and bookbinding and that kind of thing. Really intrigues me. We are here as part of Makers at the Hall, as you probably know. It's a monthly series. We're supported in this by the Warren Memorial Foundation, which is awfully nice. Due to them, we can have a couple snacks and a glass of wine at the end of the evening. And we are here tonight with Neon Dave, Dave Johansson. Is that how you say that? Splendid. Who started in California and went sort of whew across the country and now he's here making Neon signs. And so the way the evening is going to work, him and me, we're going to chat a little bit. I've got some questions I'm going to ask. And so we'll have a little conversation up here. And then after a little while, we'll turn it over. We'll make the conversation a larger conversation. So questions and things from you guys will be part of the thing in a minute. Alright, so let's get started. Hi Dave. Hi. So first off, I just said, here's Neon Dave. And you went like that across the country. Yeah, how did you get to Portland? Just super fast? Super fast. I was originally a summer person in Maine. And I was always coming back and had moved around the country a lot. And I think like a lot of people end up, you know, coming to Portland. Yes, splendid. Well, we're glad you're here with a one person Neon studio. Is that the right thing to say? You could say that. You could say shop. You could say... A shop. That sounds better. No, no, no. It really is more of a studio than a shop. Okay. Great. And what do you do in that shop? How do you make a neon sign? Because I realized in thinking about this talk that I never really thought of a person making a neon sign. It always seemed like... Yeah, I think a lot of people have it. Or they think a factory or a printer makes them or something or just never thought about it. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, a person makes every single one. Wow. Every single one. Even if it is in a factory, it's still, for the most part, people... I mean, even if they have a few little tricks, it's people bending tubes of glass and lighting them up. Wow. And so that sounds like that's shorthand for some pretty complicated processes. Because you just said, yeah, you just bend some tubes and then lay it up. Light it up. Line it up. And so there's a lot going on in there. Yeah, so you can think of it as in two main steps, which would be the bending of the glass and the lighting it up. So the bending of it, it basically comes in tubes, in four-foot tubes of different diameters and different colors. And with a series of torches, you basically work with a pattern, unless you're making it up as you go. Run. There's a whole different series of bends that you do to get the different sort of directional changes that you want in the glass. And so it's really a combination of these sort of essential, whether it's a long, gradual curve or it's folding back on itself or just making a 90-degree angle is sort of like a different amount of glass you heat up. You could use a different torch and you're blowing into the tube. One end is sealed off with a quark and the other end has a tube in it. And so as you make these bends, you blow into it because otherwise it would be like if you picture a garden hose and you bend a garden hose. Glass would be even worse than that, even worse than that because it's hot glass and it's melting. So as you bend it, it would be really, really ugly if you didn't blow into it. And so the best bending is the diameter always stays the same. As you look at it, it looks like just one fluid tube. And you could have a slight kink and you could get away with it but it would be sort of something another bender might notice wasn't so great. But much more than that and it just won't work. Or the glass itself will break because it will be stressed. It'll be one side if it's a lot thicker than the other or it's literally kinked, then it's most likely the glass will crack right there. Right, because that's a weak point. Yeah, a glass gets a lot of stress on it and so when you have things cooling and heating up at different times, that's going to cause a problem. Wow, and that's part of the magic of looking at a neon sign too, isn't it? Because it sounds like there are really practical reasons that you don't want kinks in there. And you said, oh my word, that would be so ugly. Well, yeah, I mean if you were doing something on purpose and artistically using some other glass and you want to blow a bubble, you can do that. But that's more advanced technique, it's not just sloppy bending. Right, and to the lay person, just sort of idly viewing neon as you're driving Route 66 or whatever, the smoothness of that piece of glass looks inevitable. Like obviously there are no kinks in it because it's a neon sign. So it winds up being part of the magic, but whoa, it's also important. It's important and you don't put something out there if it doesn't look like that. So you're making it, you've got a pattern, it's not necessarily all one section because that would be too many feet and it would be fragile and it would be hard to power. So at some point you have to break your pattern up into sections or if you wanted to have different colors it would be different sections and then those are wired together at the end to make one piece. So each section would have an electrode on either end. So what an electrode is is basically just, it's like a cylinder of metal that's inside a cylinder of glass and it has wires coming out of it. So you weld one of those to either end and then you have your complete unit pretty much. So then you take it to your processing station where you do what we call pumping or bombarding, is what it's called? I like bombarding. Because we use a thing called a bombarder and so we call it bombarding. But you also call it pumping because we use a vacuum. Right, when a vacuum is the opposite of a pump. I guess it depends on where you're standing. I guess it depends on which end you're at. We call it pumping. So one electrode is completely sealed off and the other one has a thin tube coming off the end of it. So this thin tube gets connected to your manifold which is part of your pumping station. So this is how you are going to get the light to light up. Basically you've got attached to this glass apparatus, a manifold, and you're vacuuming out the air. So you're pulling out all the air down to as little as possible. And then the bombarder comes in. Then you're going to bombard. So what that is is it is a power supply on steroids. It's like the thing that you see up on a telephone pole that's like a giant cylinder like that. It's putting out serious juice. So you hook that up to your unit and while it's almost completely empty of air, you're hitting it so hard with this juice that it's heating back up, not to the point of melting but getting really hot and those electrodes are starting to glow red. And you're still pulling out as hard as you can with a set of pumps. So the whole idea is to get it completely evacuated of anything, to be cleaner than space, to be nothing. So you're burning the air, you're burning any dust, you're burning any contaminants. I mean, as you were blowing it, maybe a little spit got in. There's all sorts of stuff in the air. So you're burning it all basically and pulling it down and getting it to as hard a vacuum as possible. Once you achieve that, while it's still hot, you're still pumping down. Once it's sort of cooled and it's down as far as it's ever going to get, you put a little bit of a rare gas in it. Right, and when you say rare, what do you mean rare? Rare means it doesn't make up a huge percentage of the air you're breathing, but it does make up some. And so what they are are inert gases. So if you had the periodic table, I think it's just the far right-hand side pretty much. What they are are gases that don't react with it. An inert gas doesn't react with anything else. Right, like the gold of gases. Gold forms compounds with things. Oh, I see. So you can make a molecule that's gold and something else, I think. Whereas neon, the classic inert gas, it doesn't combine with anything. Right. It's just neon by itself. So it doesn't make advanced chains. It'll never be in a long chain of carbohydrate or something. Neon is neon. And so that is basically, those gases, they can enter an excited state where they're emitting light, but they're not burning. They don't burn. Burning is like an oxidization effect that happens with things, but they're essentially burning without burning, in a sense. Wow. So they, like burning but without changing state? They don't change state. It doesn't go away by being on. Right. It's just bouncing around and setting off photons. Wow. It does, the neon doesn't go away. It doesn't get used up inside. Yeah. So I talk about the inert gases. Neon is red. Neon's red. Neon blows red. So are all, but not all neon signs are red? No. It's sort of a misnomer. Oh, okay. We call them all neon signs. They're not all neon. Most of them are argon and mercury. Wow. Right. And so, okay, mercury, not a gas. Okay, but mercury has the property of emitting light also when it's excited by electricity. And so it forms a sort of vapor and intermingles with a gas inside the tube and is the main, is actually the main emitter of light. So it's a mercury discharge tube at that point. We don't have any fluorescence here, but that's what a fluorescent light is. Oh, I see. Okay, so a white fluorescent light is essentially the exact same thing as a white neon tube. Right. It's just, it's got a little bit different power requirements and it's made in a factory, you know, not by a person, but, so essentially, essentially they're all fluorescent tubes. They're all gas discharge tubes. Right. But only red are actually neon. And neon, because that word has gone so far beyond signage too. Right. It's like a whole color. Well, usually it's sort of miss, it's sort of always a misnomer. Yeah. It's because of signs. It's because the first experience most people have with a sort of unnaturally bright colored thing are these lights. So we call, I don't know if it's just America or if that's a cross-cultural thing. We call fluorescent colors neon. Neon, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What they are is fluorescent. But they're fluorescent. Wow, trying to be more accurate for now. I mean, you don't have to be. It's the way, I mean, it's the way we speak. It is. It's the way people talk. It is. And so before we go away from talking about, because I'm fascinated by how this stuff happens. So you only named three gases and neon always makes red. No, I named two, right? Neon. And you said mercury makes this white one. No, argon. And argon. Neon and argon. Mercury, let's put that to the side. That's the diffuser. Mercury, mercury. If you add mercury to any one of the gases, it's always going to sort of turn the same color. But the gases themselves all have their own. Argon, you're not going to see it without mercury very often because it's pale. It sends out a light, but it's like a pale purple. Oh, I see. It's a very pale lavender. If the lights were on in the room, you probably wouldn't even notice it was glowing. If you turn the lights off, you'd see it better. So how do you get all those colors? Because like, you know, the arrows and things. Right. Yeah. So the colors are, it's, you have the gas. Uh-huh. Then you can have colored glass. Right. And then you could have a powder called a phosphor that's on the inside of the tube. Like a fluorescent, the same as the fluorescent light. That white is a powder that's coated on the inside of the tube. Right. So they come from the factor that way you order it. You don't have much of a choice. Sort of like buying a crayon. You know, you pick a color. Uh-huh. You can experiment by putting different gases in the different colors and get variations. Uh-huh. But you are fairly limited to the range of phosphors that are available. Uh-huh. And that has shifted over time. Right. So is that partly like chemistry has revealed new ones? Things have been invented. Yeah. I think definitely. Things that were cost prohibitive in the past become sort of more mainstream as far as the industrial process goes. Sometimes it's in conjunction with being used in a different technology. Like when televisions, I mean televisions have completely changed from how they worked. They've been a leader in phosphor production. And then maybe Neon just gets the sort of drugs or whatever they discover. Right. And then in its, there have been things that have been discontinued. Right. That are no longer available. You know, just coral doesn't sell. And so it's gone. So we're done with that. So the pallet has shifted then, essentially. The pallets definitely shifted. Yeah. So you can think of it as originally, I mean probably the reason we call them neon is because it was clear glass with red neon gas in it. That was, and so the first commercial signs was that. Was that? And so can you say a little more about like the trajectory of neon? Cause I feel like we're edging into that direction anyway. Right. And when we were talking first on the phone, you had, you said this great thing. You were like, well, you know, neon signs have kind of gone from super futuristic to retro in around a hundred years. Yeah. And that seems pretty neat. Like that's long enough for there to be a tradition. I feel like they're retro from not just one time period too. Yeah. It's had waves. It's had waves. It's had waves. And we probably don't even think of it in its first earliest forms, being like in the 20s, you know? We don't really think of neon too much in the 20s because it was probably pretty rare at that point. You know, there were a few things and people thought they were amazing, but it wasn't as ubiquitous. It wasn't quite everywhere. But you start to get into that with the 50s. And then you have your sort of, I mean, they did have some colors at this point, but it was fairly limited and it took off. I mean, 50s and probably early 60s was the real wave of neon. And then it took a serious dive to almost none in the 70s. Wow. And was that because people were just like, ugg with the neon? Or was it? Probably. And new things that now we don't even like, new plastics, new plastic signs. Right. And it was, yeah, people thought, you always, I mean, you have nostalgia, but not till multiple things have come and gone. And then you look back and you like something. So yeah, they were just like, that's so 50s or whatever. Right. That's so 50s. And it took a big dive to being almost none. And that's actually, you can look at that as an example of a big cut in what was available as far as pallets, too. Because companies stopped making it. They stopped making the raw materials for it. Right. Even if you did want to make neon or someone called you and said, I really want to sign. It changed the industry. So, I mean, Corning glass, the famous American, biggest glass, they used to make the majority of tubing. They haven't made any tubing since, I don't know, I think the 70s. Wow. Or earlier. They used to make it all. And then we started importing Italian glass. And so if you want to get colored glass now with actual glasses colored, that's Italian now. Wow. Still now. Still now. So, Italy just kept doing that. Well, they always made glass. Yeah. Italy has always made glass. Venice, Marano has always made glass. So, they can still make a batch of ruby red neon. The colored is harder because the properties change. You could make a batch of colored tubing, but you couldn't bend it. Right. If it wasn't the right properties. Yeah. That's fabulous. Because I just realized, as you say that about Italian glass and well Venice, it's so easy to put categories of glass in totally separate spaces in your head. I mean, there are differences in them, but it is sort of one... But it's glass. It is. Yeah. It's variations on a material, yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. So then it took off again in the 80s. And then we had a bunch of new colors made. And now we think of it as sort of a retro 80s thing. More than the 50s and 60s, we liked the 80s. But also what that did was in the 80s, if you're so popular, it almost insured another downfall because what they did was, it was used in movies and things to signify a bad neighbor. If you wanted a bad neighborhood, you just get some neon props and put them out. It was so widely available. We had that Girls, Girls, Girls, XXS stuff and it was almost so overdone in the 80s that there was a bit, again, of a backlash against it, including a lot of ordinances in a lot of communities against it. Right. It's pretty common to have an, if not outright ban in a town on neon specifically, then at least heavy regulations. Right. Mostly I think because of that, because of a sort of stigma that it got through the 80s and Miami Vice and stuff like that. Wow. And then, you know, still fairly productive through the 90s. And now I would say the biggest hit to it would be the new technologies again. I mean, as far as the industry itself goes, not really replacing that classic look, but there were a lot of usages of neon that you didn't really see that much, like inside of a giant letter, like say Hannaford sign on the front. Inside of those letters, it used to be neon tubing, right? They would make the light go. Yeah. The Eastland Hotel would be neon up there, you know. So that's not that exciting for a vendor type work, but it was a lot of work. Yeah. It was a lot of work. So it drove the industry, drove the production, and that's been replaced for the most part, mostly because, you know, it's cheaper. Right, right, right, right. And that sounds like bread and butter work. It was. I think it was. Sort of before my time, but it was the channel letters, those are called. Bread and butter, you would just sit in your shop and get an order, and they would bring the patterns to you, and you would do it, and then go out the door. And that's your bills, and then you do other things. That would be most of the stuff, and then you do custom things that, you know, people really notice. Yeah. And now I was, I didn't do a whole lot of poking around about neon, but I was really intrigued after you said that about this sort of 100 year time span, and it feels like our conversation certainly has mostly been about signage, and so even these channel letters, like where we don't see the neon, it's still kind of about signage and advertising. But I found little hints that there were other uses in the very, very beginning that it was like minors and like different little applications. Yeah, I mean, you got to look at light technology, you know, broadly. It's neon is getting invented not that far after the incandescent bulb, really. I mean, you've always had different lights being invented, but it goes back pretty far. So yeah, there's definitely other uses, including small indicator lights that would now be like an red LED. Yeah. It'd be like linking on a thing. It would make tiny neon in a tiny little glass, and that would be a small red bulb glowing. You also had the same technology. It was actually argon. They made quack medical devices that were like wands full of argon and a power supply in your arm, because it looks like magic. It's something that's glowing after that, not do wonderful... Dead eye doctors. Exactly. You have this wand of light over you and placebo effect as the rest. Yes! Wow, that's hilarious. I bet someone is still out there waving one of them. You can find them on eBay. They're pretty neat. They're pretty sought after. And then, you know, it's held its place in the art world, which has changed. I mean, that probably... I don't know what the earliest example of that was, but definitely back to the 60s. And that's evolved quite a bit as well. But yeah, I mean, it was immediately recognized for its commercial potential. A man named Claude in France patented it. So in 1910, he invented it and patented it. He sold... The first thing was a Packard Cars sign. So he immediately went to sign it. I mean, that was what the patent was, was sort of the shaped glass tubing to make signs, and that's what he patented. And so that's sort of, I think, why it's always held that... I mean, it plays maybe because it was effective to begin with, and he went with that for a while. It closed in the dark. It closed. And I mean, as far as other applications, like with that original bright red color for your house, I mean, they were trying to make a really nice light for people's houses, and they were trying to make incandescent lights and all this stuff, but Neon just wasn't going to cut it. They would never consider that. They were always looking for a nice warm white. Something more candle-like. Yeah, so it's always been a battle for quality of light, between effectiveness and quality of light as far as in the house goes. People sometimes don't like the fluorescence these days because of the quality, but that probably goes more to the efficiency and the effectiveness. And in comparison, the quality is actually not that bad. It's not as bad as a high-pressure sodium lighter. One of those yellow, like if you're on a construction site. So in any case, Neon was never... No one took it that way. You know, I don't think Edison did anything with it. I don't think anyone did anything with it. Yeah. Neon people like to say that Tesla invented it. Oh, I would like to say that too. Does everyone love Tesla? Yes, Tesla, Bombard. I mean, I'm sure he messed around with all sorts of glowing gases, but to say he invented Neon is sort of... I mean, I don't know about that. I haven't seen any evidence of that. He certainly made a lot of things glow and light up, and he probably knew all about the gases. I mean, that had been discovered just as far as when they were discovering the elements themselves. I mean, they had to discover each element in the periodic table one at a time, and when they found these gases, they immediately found that they glowed. That was one of the first things they noticed, was like, we've got the gas, it glows. Yeah, but one would notice that it... I mean, they were conducting experiments, and I think they must have had electrical charges around when they were separating the gases out. That must have been a neat moment, the first time that weird glass glowed. Well, I think Mercury, they knew that from even longer, because they were always using that in industrial practices, and there was something about shaking a bottle of Mercury and making it glow, and they knew that it could do that. Yeah, wow. So, I have two more questions for you. One is, what's the deal with the hum, when neon signs hum, because they don't all hum? What's going on when they make that noise? Okay, well, we've got a mystery. I mean, not really. They all have a bit of an electric field around them, you know? That could be indicative of... You could perhaps rewire it. It might be that the power supply itself is on its way out. Something could be sort of grounded to metal, and it's sort of trying to pull the electricity out of the sign and into the metal. Right? It's really... I mean, neon is very scientific, but not very exact. It's not a very exact science, because otherwise we would spend all our time trying to figure out why it was humming instead of making the next project. Right. So, I honestly don't know. I know sometimes it hums, and sometimes it doesn't. If it's really bad, you probably have a problem. If not, I don't know, turn the music up. Excellent, excellent. Wow, and then the last question I wanted to ask you is, what do you love about neon signs, and where, as we walk around in Portland noticing the neon around us here, where are the good ones? Where are the good ones? Which signs are your favorites that we should keep our eyes peeled for? Why are those the great signs around here? What should we be looking for? I don't really like anything that I didn't make. Oh, yeah. Sort of, not really. That's not true. There are ones I don't really mess with outdoor work. It's just too large scale. That's usually something for a big company and stuff. So there's ones I can appreciate. Certainly that I, you know, they're outdoors. I couldn't have even worked on it. Yeah. I like the Pizza Villa sign. Okay. Down that way. It's all old school, and they've got nice signs in their windows too. A good outdoor one is on commercial. The Boone Slopster place I think is pretty good. Okay. My favorite that I've made is the Downtown Lounge, which is on Congress and High. It's a scorpion. I've seen that scorpion. Scorpion, yeah. That is a good scorpion. That's probably my favorite. Yeah. People like the Bar Arcadia one a lot, which says live nerds on it. Excellent. And I recently did one at the Burger Bar, which is pretty close to here in between High. I mean, it's free in Congress. Yeah. It's a pretty elaborate girl holding a burger. Oh, I think I know that sign. It's pretty new. Maybe I don't know that sign yet. It's pretty new. It's inside. If you go inside, you have to go inside and get a burger, and then you'll see it. Okay. And then it's there. Did you do food and beverage? No. That's outside. It's outside. Yeah. No. Yeah. I guess I like the material more than I like signs themselves. Yeah. Nothing made me go out and say, I want to make signs. Yeah. I wanted to make neon, and the only thing people want is signs. It's all we know to want. Well, I don't consider a lot of them signs. Like the scorpion. Not really a sign. I mean, are you buying? I mean, they have a scorpion ball, but if it's not text or the logo of a business, I don't really consider a sign. I consider it neon. I mean, people, I understand most people connect those two words, neon sign. You can't say one if you don't say the next. Yeah. But I have a pretty clear view in my head of what's a sign and what's not. Right. If it says the name, yeah, that's a sign. It's clearly a sign. If it says what you're selling, that's a sign. But that scorpion, it could go anywhere, though. It's a piece of neon. Yeah. What do you love about that scorpion? Because it's just neat. But there's got to be more to say than it's just neat. What was enjoyable about creating that? Well, I like to make things a little... Not just in neon, but in most things. You don't really see the point in doing something unless you're going to do it a little different or a little better. Yeah. Just to do something, just to do it. I mean, sure, bread and butter, whatever, you got to do that. But when I make something like that, I try to put enough into it so I can be relatively certain that it's probably the greatest neon scorpion ever. Yeah. I mean, if someone makes a better one, then I'll have to make another one. You have to make... Right. Clearly. Yes. So yeah, I guess I like that. And I like that it's something that sort of affects the character of the place I live. And when you do something local like that, that's like a little mark on a city. It's a little something that even if people recognize that they're even seeing it, they are maybe on the corner of their eye. They're getting hit with some of that red light, whether they like it or not. That's right. And so I feel like if I can dot them around, that's probably one of the things that's more enjoyable about the work itself is that it's sort of... It's visible. It's out there. Yeah. And it makes me think there's a neat term I saw recently, urban acupuncture. What's that? Which is teeny weeny interventions in urban life that have a really big impact. And so there's a little book by Jamie Lair with that title. And he talks about things like the all night little tiny corner store owners in New York City are... They are all urban acupuncture points because they're open all night. And so that corner is suddenly a little safer, a little friendlier than it would otherwise be. And it seems like there's something similar about these little points of light being dotted around a city that have this aesthetic impact. It brings life to the night. Yeah. And in this particular way, there's a style to it. There's an aesthetic to every piece of light that goes out in neon. That's just really neat. That's really neat. Wow. Did you see what they... What? You were curious to know? Okay. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been so much fun talking with you. So let's open it up and see what people think or are curious about if there are questions or... Yeah. In the back there. And then I see you in the... I see you next. Who makes neon? Where do you get it? Does it come in a big... The gas. Okay. So you don't... And how long will it last? I mean, if you found a sign from the cities that haven't been cracked or broken, could you plug it in again? And it wouldn't work. Okay. So first question. It comes from the air, right? It is in the air. I think there's more of it the higher up you go. Companies that make gases, hoover a bunch of the air up, and separate out all the gases from each other. When I was talking about making that tube as much of a vacuum as possible, you're putting very little of the rare gas inside. Just a... It's still under vacuum. If you break a neon tube, air sucks in. So it's very little. So I have one bottle of neon this big, and I have no idea when it's going to run out, but it seems like it's lasting forever. Italy or New Jersey? Germany. Germany. Okay. How long does it last? Neon doesn't go bad. The tube breaks. The tube will break, or if it's on for a very long time, those electrodes that I said were on either end have a little bit of metal in them. Those will get degraded. Basically, they're getting... All the electrons that are hitting them are sort of like meteors hitting the moon. So over a long period of time, they're going to get pitted out and degrade. If everything was completely optimal, that would be how it failed. It would be in the order of a long time. A long, long time. At least 80, 70, 80 years. The longest continuously operating piece of neon, and I believe that's actually Argonne in there, is out in LA. It's like 77 years has been on. They found it in a wall. Someone had walled it off and left it on. Only in LA. Walled it off with the power supply and everything. They were doing renovations. They took down a part of a wall, and there was a light on inside of it. And it's still... Now it's like a tourist attraction. Go see the longest continuous operating tube. Did you have a question? Me? Yeah. This sounds like an expensive thing to experiment with. As far as when you're making signs, can you explain it almost like I am a fourth grader, as far as the equation of how much script you can get if you're doing an 80-inch script? Because you said it's not an exact science. Is that a fair question? How much? Like how much before you have to disnick and then start the... How many feet can you... How many feet? How many feet? Okay, that's partially a requirement of your system itself for processing. If you have the best Bones Badass system ever, you can get a lot more. Because you've got a stronger bombarder that's going to be putting out way more juice and your vacuum is going to be capable of drawing a really tight vacuum really fast. So it is somewhat variable. So if you're talking about just straight... a straight tube, then you're limited by how long your table is. Basically, like... I mean, you can't... By table do you mean like glue windows? The table... No, like the actual table that you're... the actual table it's sitting on. I mean, I can't go further than six or eight feet because then I hit a wall. But then if it's all knotted up, I would probably go... I mean, it depends on the diameter of the glass a little bit too, but I would probably... I could go close to 20 feet probably. 20 feet in... Total. Total, total, total length, yeah. Probably about 20 feet. Okay, so is this something that you obviously map out on a chalkboard before you do it or is it loosey-goosey-like? As far as when to do it, it's more about your pattern. It's really more about your pattern and what's going to make sense. What's going to make sense as far as where to break it? Because there's going to be a break there and it's just... sort of how it's easy is to handle as well and put it all together and wire it all up. It seems to me like... maybe at this point it's a little bit instinctual for me. You know, but it's... you sort of just have to break things up into blocks and if it's a word, if it's say it's really long, you're just going to go every couple of letters. Okay, so you eyeball it this way? Definitely. You definitely eyeball that. You do have to sort of have a vague idea of your total footage, cumulative, all the pieces together because that's going to dictate your power supply that you use and how much power it's going to require. But as far as each one goes, it doesn't really matter. It's going to be cumulative anyway. You could have a short one and a long one right next to each other. And if you want to switch colors too, say you had an eyeball that you wanted glowing red neon and the whole rest of the head was going to be argon, you can make just that little eye in neon so it's only less than a foot of glass. So you can have really small sections too. And just because it came up, it's the second time it's come up, the notion of patterns. And what does a pattern look like? Is it on paper? Right, so... What is that? Usually on paper. It could be on... If say you wanted to reuse it a whole lot of times, if you were doing something mass produced, you could have it on a flame-proof cloth so you could reuse it and reuse it because the paper does sort of get burned up eventually. It's backwards because you're doing it on a table and so face down. So what is flat on the table is the front of your piece so if you're doing text, it has to be all reversed and you reverse any image. And it looks like a line drawing, basically. Yeah, it's two lines. You do the width of the tube and you would make it skinnier or fatter based on what size glass you were using. And there's different ways, certainly different ways of making them. I am pretty old-school and low-tech in most things I do and so mine are mostly hand... I start off with a pencil and end up with a Sharpie and use an overhead projector to do a lot of stuff, but I would say in larger-scale operations they would 100% be made on a printer. Right, right, one of those big plotters. A big plotter would blot it out, yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Are there things that people are curious about? Want to hear more about? Yeah. More about your market and if you're selling commercial or residential applications and also is it more local like in Newland or is it all United States or international? Are you shipping? How are you managing that? So I have a fine art practice as well as this commercial, the commercial stuff so I sort of split my time with that. I'm not really sending, I don't really have shipping-type sending stuff so it's pretty much local. I've done a few other things but for the most part local and that also really helps because these things do sometimes electrically-need servicing and troubleshooting it helps to be nearby to take care of that. So I would, and then I've definitely done some residential things for people. I'd like to do even more of that. The thing is it isn't cheap. It's hard to justify the amount of work that goes into something and then undersell it for just because, you know, because it gets expensive but certainly done any sort of commission really. I keep my overhead pretty low by being in a sort of group work environment so that helps me to keep the cost down for myself and then I can sort of focus on this stuff. I would say locally for me 80% restaurants these days. I mean, it seems to be where the local economy is and that's who needs neon so that's what I'm doing now mostly. But I am certainly interested in doing more home stuff and eventually online and shipping stuff out having some sort of line of things that I can maybe not mass produce but replicate somewhat and have be somewhat affordable and have a sort of streamlined shipping operation and I think that would be probably one of the avenues that would be best for me to go down as far as that goes. I have one more question. Does neon have to plug into the wall or could you use solar power? Could use solar power? Well, it's essentially this solar power or wall power both basically power. If you were to have a solar powered unit that wasn't if there's solar power wasn't powering your whole house you would definitely you would need a battery. I think you would solar power a big like car battery and then you could power the neon with that through a 12 volt inverter but yeah, for the most part what the neon runs on high voltage so the wall you need a transformer to take the power out of the wall and turn it into the kind of power that neon uses. I love the inverter it feels like an inversion like a paradox to have a solar powered neon because neon is always on at night I feel like or it goes better in the dark. I saw a guy I worked for had a prototype sort of system thing that was a big battery and a big solar power panel and it powered like one tube. Right, catch the sun power the sun. But you could theoretically get it all get fill up a battery all day long and then have a neon sign in the middle of the nowhere for a couple hours definitely at night. Yeah. You mentioned your own commercial hopes. Do you have some ideas for non-commercial? For you mean neon? Yeah. Well I think of it well I mean I work on my own artwork which I have a couple series going on and plan on showing and sort of in the fine art world but then I also think of like this more simplified home design type of things that people would like that are sort of non-text based I think that that's never been my focus and there's plenty out there if you wanted to get a silly word on the wall there are already people sort of doing that so I want to take it more in a different direction it's a little more like minimalist and retro cool and have something that's in the affordable range that I could easily easily ship out. Yeah. I've been to the downtown Lash so I've seen your Scorpion outside it's the bright red but on the inside it's black do you dip it in the sun? No, that one's not dipped. Is it the same red? That one has a as a tinted acrylic sort of backer so it's dimmer on the it's dimmer on the inside because it's it's in like a sunglasses sort of material but then there's other times when you dip the back of you dip the back of more likely text in black paint and that's sort of that's a way to sort of erase the connections and the parts that you don't that aren't part of the letter that goes behind it and so you sort of dip the whole back of it into black paint. Wow and that so that means just thinking about the logistics of that which is kind of neat that so when you're making text that there's a it needs to kind of it reads in it in two dimensions essentially but it has to be deep enough that you can just dip the whole thing to get those connections Well basically if you think of it in sort of two planes so you have that face down and then when it comes off the table that's behind the sign but it's when you're bending it that's up and that's how you go in between letters that's how you connect letters together and then say it's cursive you wouldn't you probably wouldn't dip it because you want those connections but if it's text you can you can you can go pretty you can you know you can even go like this on the back and then once you paint that out you just see the glowing letters you don't see the the connections Right Right more things I'm glad you noticed that because I you mentioned that on the phone about painting stuff out and it just seems to me any concept yes what does it take to make something just something simple is it days is it a week you know could you what's simple what's what's simple what's simple is it like is it like a word or just a line like the fireplace you know could you show somebody how you do this in an afternoon with it and get a finished product you know you could not okay it's probably the scale the you I could get something done in one day I could bend all the glass and process it all in one day but the majority of my projects take more like a week of bending and a day of processing and often times I'll get a lot of stuff ready before I do it and then I can just have one day of processing so I'll have you know upwards of 10 or 12 things that I need to do the pumping with and so yeah so it's not it's not usually a one day thing suddenly when you say that that you get oh sorry when you get several things going like you make a stack of signs and then you're going to process them all that sounds like storage is a delicate it seems like it's a delicate process it's kind of just laying all over the place excellent I feel better yeah what were you going to say and then I see a question in the very back so are you busy with a satellite or nap gas or no natural gas it's just natural gas straight from the city you could use propane in tanks propane burns a little hotter I think and then it's mixed with forced air so it's a I have a blower that's just blowing regular atmosphere I don't need oxygen or any I don't need anything in a tank actually it's just the gas from the city and the forced air are you using rosebud tips to own the end of the torch to pinpoint or make more brawl when you're trying to heat up a certain bend do you have different tips that you screw on? no I have two different hand torches that are mostly used for welding and then I use mostly a ribbon burner for almost every bend which basically you can get your long curves with because it's very long or you can shorten it down and just get a little sort of square of fire and then I'm turning the glass on top of that wow I love that how your inner pyromaniac has a little bit of an outlet oh yeah the fire part's fun yeah yeah was there a question in the back did you have something I was thinking about those ones that have like the girls you know the lights animated right there animated do people make those yeah sure I haven't actually made one of those but I have worked in a shop that's made them in New York basically in that case instead of the whole thing being powered by one power supply each one of those ones that flashes has to have its own little one and then you have a controller that's saying now you turn on you turn off you turn on you turn off and it just has a little program kind of a light it would actually have a rotor going around and switching it now we have little computers that you program basically that are going to turn things on and off I'm not dying to do it myself they are cool I'm not dying to do it and then you could get also things that flash on and off just for one thing to flash on and off or something and sometimes like that that's a question within the same shop right large time shops still are usually like that where they are going to be they are going to have a lot of different departments including professional installers and boom trucks yeah painters everything back to the designers and the project managers and things like that yeah full on bureaucracy yeah but did you have a question too? I did there's an earlier question about how how long the piece you could make but and you mentioned that that there's often times the different colors the patterns will dictate where you bring them where one piece stands the next piece starts but it also seems like I mean is it a case that part of what drives that is this idea that even though you could make a sign out of a single tube that if you like screwed up on the last bend that you would lose all the work that you had done you know what I mean? it depends where yeah sort of sort of I think that I mean you can connect two colors together two in the same tube as long as it's the same gas in there you wouldn't lose all of it necessarily as long as you weren't trying to do it I mean if you now because you if you were connecting multiple pieces together you'd be welding them together anyway so you'd already have weld marks the only the only case I could see in which you would mess up and then have to redo completely would be if you were trying not to have any welds at all like say you have your four foot length of glass and you didn't want to have any connections on this piece you just wanted one thing you didn't want any welds then yeah if you mess up at the end you messed up the whole thing but usually you can cut back you can you can find a place to cut back and weld more on but you could certainly lose a couple hours of work one more question anything else yeah great who's like blowing your mind right now and neon or any other kind of realm that's really inspiring at work hmm well it's interesting because Instagram has kind of changed everything as far as my world conception goes of neon because now I'm sort of seeing it's not everything everyone's doing in the world because people obviously aren't on Instagram sometimes but they are on it all over the world so I'm seeing what people are doing in Japan in Brazil I'm seeing both the strictly commercial and the strictly art side of things as well and then the few people like me that are sort of I've got our feet in both worlds what is blowing my mind right now aesthetically it's not necessarily neon but it's this I do like this sort of retro wave 80s aesthetic that's that's pulsing through the internet like this sort of Ferrari Testarosa sunset um that sort of that sort of drives me um so yeah I have my favorite Instagram type of benders where it's like they post the right pictures and we have a bit of a thing where people you know you can tell when you're putting up pictures for other people in the industry not to impress people who aren't in it and so you're showing when people show the bends and they show it maybe not even lit you know just from behind on the pattern show the bends just like look I nailed it and as opposed to as opposed to this needing to show the finished product I would say in the most commercial aspect and then in the more sort of artistic aspect the opposite of that of people who don't really show their work ever they just show like oh I'm a I do neon I do this I do that but they don't really actually show me the work so I'm more into I'm definitely more into people mastering and showing their mastery that seems like a great moment to end on the notion of people showing their mastery and but please feel free stick around there is there are two colors of wine back there one is red and one is white if you mix them you have three and some sparkly water and some brownies and a couple snacks and some brown and chit chat and I'm so glad you're all here thank you so much thank you thank you