Written By: Ally L
Visiting Advantage
On Thursday, the 21st of August, Talon visited one of our most unique sponsors: Advantage Signs & Graphics, INC. They are the Twin Cities street sign manufacturers and also provide signs for much of central Minnesota. They sponsor us by giving the team the most wonderful sheet metal: traffic signs from their scrap pile.
In our most recent visit, they gave us 83 pounds of signs! This included an adorable 7th Avenue street sign, which is currently displayed in the robotics room. We also received several of their Wrong Way signs, because they are a bright red, like Talon’s team colors! Visiting their company is always a fun experience, and we love using the traffic signs for our projects.
The reason we first reached out to Advantage Signs & Graphics, Inc., was for robot bellypans. Many teams attach a piece of sheet aluminum to the bottom of their robots to help hold the whole robot together and make it easier to build.
The Origins of the Signs
In 2024, a mentor donated a stop sign to use instead of a giant piece of brand-new sheet aluminum. Everyone loved the stop sign bellypan, and we knew we wanted to have one for the 2025 season. So, the Sponsorships subteam reached out to the Minnesota stop sign manufacturers, Advantage Signs & Graphics, Inc., and asked for this very strange donation.
To our surprise, they agreed! The employees were slightly confused by our request, but extremely sweet and helpful, and we were able to get a stop sign for the bottom of our 2025 robot! We were also able to build many prototypes out of other traffic signs. Though we did not get any stop signs at this most recent visit, we are so excited to build fun projects using these signs.
Fun Projects with the Signs!
We made our pneumatic climber prototype using a stop sign as a base, because we wanted it to be out of metal but didn’t want to use expensive sheet metal on a prototype.
We made a pneumatic locking mechanism prototype for the same climber using a parking zone sign, for similar reasons.
Working with traffic signs allows Talon to have a lot of fun with our projects and save money on expensive materials. Thank you so much to Advantage Signs & Graphics, Inc., for this amazing opportunity!
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