Well, I just googled around till I found a picture of Flynn’s sign in action. Mhhh… it looks like it uses up to 5 neon tubes in a row on one letter. I was going to use three. On the other hand when I study the pic from shazammy it looks more like three, but the sign is aproximately 26 years old, hence those missing tubes may have fallen off.

Anyway, I will stick with my 3 lines of EL wire per letter. I made a little mock up that shows my wireingscheme. For the inner part I will go with yellow and the outlines will be red or orange, if I can get it. White is by far too hard.

While the orange coating I gave my letters is drying you can check out some nice resource of the movie:

The building where Flynn’s scenes where taken, down in Curver City/LA , nowadays.

The location on google maps.

Tron Sector is THE resource if you are looking for information about Tron:

Tronguy... well, look for yourself.

enjoy…

Bookmark to:

Yesterday I stumbled across the Flynn’s Arcade sign at flickr. Shazammy seems to be the one who found it and lucky me he took a good, detailed picture of it. I instantly started thinking about how to redo it for my little arcade corner at home.

Today I sat down and made the lettering. First I tried to take some fonts and tinkered around with Illustrators offset path function, but in the end it all looked crappy. Fonts are never symetric and so I found myself with uneven spread of the three colors. I ended up drawing all letters by myself. I used the line function to do so and when I was through I copied the path three times over another and gave it different stroke thickness. Done with that, I outlined the strokes. Last step on this part was to cut off unwanted curves and corners on top and bottom of the letters that appear when using thick strokes. Done. A little printout to see how it will look like in real.

I just returned from the basement, where I carbon copied the letters to a foamboard and cut them out. Quite nice, though cut freehand with a crapy padsaw. I will use those letters to test the wirering and the look before I do them over again… next time with colors aplied and better cut.

On the pic you can see the plot along with all calculations for wirering and the cut out letters.

For the light itself, I was thinking about getting some EL-wires. Those are quite cheap, easy to handle and low on power consumption. Believe it or not: I will need 220cm (2.2m!) of wire to get all letters once. although the final dims of the sing is around 50×22cm! The original Flynn’s got 3 strips each letter. For the colors I go for red or white (original) for the outline and yellow for center. This should give it an authentic touch and the wire is bon marché.

Bookmark to:

First of all, sorry for all those who posted comments and didn’t get them online. WPs notification didn’t work and I haven’t checked the comments as I was more or less used to write for my own. The failure was simple to get by: wordpress sends out emails using wordpress@yourblogdomain.xyz and so I had to log into my providers c-panel and generate this wordpress@ adress. Now it should work and I should get an email when you leave a comment.

Weather is picking up, summer seems to hit germany and I feel my batteries recharging. I am solarpowered, you know. I was working on the other sidepanel of my minicade lately and wanted to show the progress. I will add logos of old computer systems on the bottom line, just as I did on the left side. I am not sure what to write…. Computers? Systems? Homerarcade? Any sugestions?

Next is the font style… I am thniking of something from the 80s, early 90s… something like Speedball or more like Storm Across Europe. The quality of the used covers is far from perfect. In the end I will need to brush up the resolution. Keep your fingers crossed.

Bookmark to: