CASPER, Wyo — The First Interstate Bank tower clock got an upgrade from Nix Signs and High Country Crane on Saturday, replacing a decade-old LED system that had been glitching more and more in recent years.
“This will do so much for them, graphics-wise,” Casey Nix, owner of Nix Signs, said on Saturday. “They’ve upgraded from a digital clock to a TV.”
High Country Crane handled the installation of the display on top of the First Interstate tower 189 feet in the air. “Those guys are the best of the best,” Nix said.
The new clock faces might also give the Casper community some comfort they’ve been missing.
“The bank would always gets calls from people when the sign went out,” Nix said. “They really enjoyed it. I think they relied on it more than they needed to!”
The red LED lights had been replaced on one face 5 years ago, and in the last 4 months the display had begun to degrade again, and the east-facing display shut off entirely.
Nix said that the parts needed to replace the old display were becoming “non-existent.”
So it was time for an upgrade. First Interstate Bank approached Nix in October of 2019 about the new display. Nix said the project was ready to go two months ago, but bad weather and the coronavirus made deployment untenable.
Nix and High Country Crane would make the call on Wednesday or Thursday whether or not to go ahead with the installation that weekend.
“We chose Memorial Day weekend, so we would have that extra day” Nix said.
Nix said he was a bit nervous about Saturday’s forecast, with 20-30% possibility of thunderstorms. “But that’s what we do,” he said.
Nix said the new signs are full-color, high-resolution displays with 19mm pixel pitch. The company that produced them claims they can display 64 million colors.
“I don’t know how they account for all those colors,” Nix said, “but that’s what they tout.”
