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Old-fashioned ingenuity solves sign clutter

Nothing like good, old-fashioned ingenuity.

Take Chad Barber (pictured above), for instance.

After getting tired of digging through piles of signs to find the right one, he decided to do something about it.

He found angle iron at the Idaho Falls shed and purchased $115 worth of metal tubing at Pacific Steel in town, then went to work building a sign rack.

A transportation technician operator (TTO) in District 6, he first designed the rack and then cut the tubing into needed lengths.

His efforts were well-received by others at the shed. Fellow TTOs Steven Stroschein and Preston Searle, of the Idaho Falls shed, helped him weld the lengths together. TTO Casey Messick also helped with the project.

Voila! A handy sign holder containing 30 slots, each capable of holding 10 signs. The team dubbed the holder a “Roll-up Sign Organizer Rack” and then labeled slots with sign names for easy identification.

“Now we back up the trailer to the organizer rack and load up needed signs,” Barber said. “No more rummaging through a pile of signs and unrolling them to find the right ones.”

Barber estimates the organizer rack will save the Idaho Falls maintenance crew about 150 hours per year.

“The innovation has improved our response time by 20 to 30 minutes,” Foreman JR Grotjohn said. “We set up traffic control quicker for improved highway safety.”

Ingenuity pays off!