PD4104 Destination Sign

We have been operating a food truck in this 1956 PD4104 in Pittsburgh for just over a year now and figured it was time to finish the front destination scroll. For the past year it has just been a blank white screen illuminated with LED’s from the back. Our goal was to put all of our home base destinations on the scroll so people would see where the bus was heading to serve global street food.

This project was put on the back burner for a year because the bus was booked 5 days a week serving food and we didn’t have too much down time to do non mission critical projects. This winter we entered our slow season and we were afforded the opportunity to take on some small projects.

Original destination scroll from an old Greyhound bus.

The main hurdle with this destination sign was finding the right paper to put onto the scrolls. This paper needed to be durable and able to be backlit. The original scrolls (from what I can gather) were made from a thin white cloth or canvas that would have a black background painted on it to have white letters shown for the destination.

This style of making signs was what the industry at the time has available to them and was common practice. Nowadays these products are not easy to come by. There are a few companies that offer custom build scrolls, and LED signs to replace the old mechanisms, but keeping the original parts was a high priority for this project.

After much research and deep dives into google searches, I finally reached a solution for the scroll material. It was in a conversation with my friend Asa (Co-founder/Owner/Creative Director of Brew Gentlemen) that he suggested a ‘1 1/2 stop reductions diffusion paper’ that he recently used in project at his brewery. The paper he was suggesting was strong polyester based material that diffused light from behind, which was perfect for this project. It comes in 25’ rolls which was more than enough for what we wanted to do.

After purchasing the paper, It had to be cut to the width of the scroll which terrified me just because it was a $130 roll of paper that I didn’t want to screw up. I ended up using a band saw to cut the scroll to length and it worked like a dream. Below you can see images and video of the new paper being installed.

The next part of the project was to add the destinations that Blue Sparrow would be traveling to throughout the year. For this I borrowed my brothers Cricut Cutter to cut out vinyl letters to stick to the sign. This process was a but of a learning curve, but eventually a rhythm was found that made it really easy. It involved fitting the lettering to a specific size in an appropriate font, cutting the vinyl, wedding out the designs, transferring it to a clear alignment paper, and then transferring it onto the paper rollers. All photos of this process are below and the final product is a huge improvement to the outside esthetic of our food bus. If you have any question please feel free to contact me.

Thank you for reading this, if you are interested in more of this build check out the archives and see the Bus Build series.