What started out merely as a hobby for 15-year-old Roger Ligrano has become, 25 years later, a full-grown neon-sign business.
Ligrano owns and runs the Neon & Electric Sign business at 1617 15th Ave. W. with his father, Roger Ligrano, Sr. "We're pretty much a team," says Ligrano the junior.
It was a neon sign of a woman's head in the window of his dad's antique store, along with a later visit to a neon business, that really got him hooked on the medium when he was a teenager, Ligrano says.
It was something about how the glowing light fluctuates and pulses, he remembers, as his dog, Becker, scurries around underfoot in the sign studio near the Magnolia Bridge.
So Ligrano got some tools and built a neon-sign shop in his basement. "Basically as I was growing up it became a business," he explains. Ligrano says he started out doing mostly abstract designs, but it was good practice.
"When you're learning to blow neon glass, you have to learn how the material behaves," he says. That's not always easy. "The material really does what it wants," Ligrano explains. It took years of just doing it to get the techniques down right, the artisan adds.
The work gets especially complicated when a single neon tube is used to spell out a word. The glass has to be bent just so or it will be impossible to get all the strokes of each letter on the sign.
That's worked out in schematic drawings beforehand. "You indicate it all on the pattern," Ligrano says. "I design pretty much every sign." These days, that often involves computer graphics, but the process wasn't always so high-tech.
"I used to sit down with customers and do a pencil sketch," Ligrano says. "I draw them full-size sometimes," he adds in reference to projects that sometimes measure up to 10 feet by 10 feet, for example.
Ligrano has stocks of glass tubes in 80 to 100 different colors he uses for the projects. But colors also depend on whether he uses neon, which glows a reddish color, or argon, which glows a bluish color. Thus, a yellow glass tube filled with glowing red neon will look orange.
Electrodes that power the neon or argon are added as the signs are made. "You start at one end and work to the opposite end," he says. Once the sign is completed, a high-voltage transformer is used to heat the glass to between 550 and 580 degrees Fahrenheit while the air is evacuated.
The glass is allowed to cool to around 125 degrees, which creates a near-perfect vacuum. "Then you backfill it with neon or argon," Ligrano explains. Or sometimes both gasses are injected, and the piece glows both reddish and bluish colors because the neon and argon gases naturally separate.
Flashing neon signs are a bit more complicated, he says, and about twice as expensive because extra transformers are needed to turn the different sections on and off. "A lot of people can't afford the flashing signs because the prices are so high."
Ligrano estimates the business makes between 700 and 800 signs per year, and he has a crew of around eight men who install them. He also uses the talents of neon assistant Julie Harer, who is in charge of disassembling the signs at the shop and reassembling them at their new homes.
The signs from the business are everywhere. The Hale's Ales neon signs are theirs, as are the Olympic Pizza sign in Queen Anne and the Belltown Billiards sign, Ligrano says of just a few examples.
"And we specialize in rebuilding old signs like Salty's on Alki," he adds. The company has also been commissioned to make a Shell gas station sign for a station the Issaquah Historical Society is restoring in the eastside city.
Ligrano says that the business also works off design drawings to fabricate neon works for a well-known Seattle artist he couldn't name. In addition, the business sometimes makes up neon signs for 5th Avenue Theatre productions, which typically return the signs at the ends of the runs.
The 5th Avenue Theatre signs included the one for the musical, "Smokey Joe's Café." "That one we liked so much, we hung it up there [outside], which is funny because people think it's a café," Ligrano smiles.
Indeed, someone stops by and knocks on the front door thinking just that. It just goes to show the power of advertising, Ligrano says. "Signs really do matter. It's amazing."
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
