Billboard sign printers

[Aaron Addison]

Does anyone out there know someone that has a billboard sign printer and that might be sympathetic to printing out a BIG cave map for the cost of materials?

Thanks-

AA

[Scott McCrea]

How big? Do you have the paper already? Tim White (a moderator here) has probably already left for TAG, but he may be able to help too.

[graveleye]

my stepfather has a plotter, but I bet you're looking for something even bigger.

[Aaron Addison]

The overall size of the map will likely be something in the neighborhood of 60' x 60'. I am hoping to be able to print it in 6 to 8 panels.

AA

[Scott McCrea]

Whaaaa?!?! 60 feet x 60 feet?

Seriously?

Why? Are you printing a map at full scale? hehe.

Where are you going to store it? You'd have to roll it up like a cover for a baseball infield. bahaha.

[Aaron Addison]

Actually, that will just be at 1" = 50'. Turns out the world's longest cave needs the world's biggest cave map. It will take most of a basketball court to display.

Look for a special presenation of this map at the 2007 NSS Convention. The idea is to have folks take their shoes off and walk around on the map.


AA

[Scott McCrea]

Oh OK. Cool. Very cool. I'll check with the folks I know.

[HKalnitz]

Try this link Aaron

http://www.cartotalk.com/index.php?auto ... =02&cat=20

It is the resources link at Cartotalk - When I was running down a printer for a map, I thought I noticed one or two offering to do large format prints. Maybe you can hook them on the uniqueness of the project and get a price cut!

Howard

[Aaron Addison]

Thanks for the link Howard. I'm constantly on CartoTalk and must have just missed it.

As an aside for all cartographers out there experienced and brand new, CartoTalk is a wonderful resource.

AA

[George Dasher]

Please be advised I've already got my shoes off in anticipation!

[John Lovaas]

To Aaron and Howie-

Howie- thanks for the cartotalk.com link/reminder- my cartography instructor from NIU mentioned several weeks ago that he had seen a cave map there(which was yours, apparently!), and when I visited the site, the forum had been hacked. Glad to see it is up and running.

I had never heard of the site- or NACIS- and am planning on getting involved. I have a map in the student competition at their annual convention in Madison this week.

Aaron- have you floated the map production idea by any universities- yours, Western Kentucky, etc.? I have to imagine it would be quite the "feather in their cap" to be involved.

Let me know how much the ink and paper would cost- I'd be more than happy to underwrite that. But you have to promise- if a drunken jackass tries to play a game of Twister on the finished work, I get to soak them with Mace. That's all.

jl

[Scott McCrea]

Aaron,

Don't know if you still need help with this, but I saw this on Digg.com this morning. "...how to create, huge(up to 20 meters), awesome looking, rasterized wall posters using previously mentioned Rasterbator. It’s free and easy to use piece of software and the whole procedure won’t take you more then 5-10 min(not incl. poster printing and putting it on your wall). Enjoy!" LINK

[John Lovaas]

Hi Scott-

That is an interesting bit of software- I had to play around with it this morning.

One downside is that it is producing a raster image with rather large dots- the test image I did was run with a 5mm dot size. You can run with a smaller dot size(to 1mm), but it is still a dot, so any line detail is going to look awfully funky.

All that being said, I think a lot of really cool stuff could be done with the software. Truly MASSIVE images.

Here is a coqui and our cat.

jl

[Aaron Addison]

I ran across this last fall when I began researching for the MACA map. Unfortunately the plan is to have less paper (not more!).

Right now the plan seems to be plotting the map in 60" wide strips as long as we can.

Anyone want to dontate to the plotter paper fund........?

AA

[chh]

don't know if you've reached a conclusion yet, but I used to work for a scene shop and we had a printer 4 feet wide which we used for banners and large graphics. It worked pretty well and you could include color as well. Actually, most of the stuff we did was in color. The 4 foot wide paper came off a roll and could, theoretically be as long as you wanted. Might check with an outfit like that if there's one near you. We often did signs and banners for folks in addition to the other on sight work we did.

That sounds like one hell of a map!