David Lenkowsky strides past six motorcycles standing sentry duty in his Mr. Sign shop on Tuckahoe Road in Yonkers. In a moment, he will be at the controls of a high-tech laser, cutting a panel for a motion controller that will help guide Broadway show scenery.
The sign-making Lenkowsky is an eloquent engineer, more than a little facile with the array of computers that keep his shop running and at ease translating their wonders into laymen”™s terms. The biker Lenkowsky is also an engineer, modifying bikes and riding them off-road across the hills and dales of New Jersey in six-hour contests of skill and endurance and also pausing at a sasquatch crossing in Alaska. A picture proves he stopped; a biker-bigfoot collision would be bad for all but tabloid headline writers.
Lenkowsky”™s enthusiasm for both worlds could well make him the best guy in the world to sit next to on a long flight ”¦ which he”™s about to take, incidentally, to a motorcycle adventure tour in Romania ”“ all off-road ”“ on an Austrian KTM 450 Enduro.
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The shop is a wonder.
“Most people have no idea,” he says of his 2,500-square-foot facility. “They”™re expecting to come down here and find the old man and the brush. The old man and the brush went the way of the horse and buggy.” But he qualifies that statement: “The 23-karat gold leafing we do by hand ”“ a marriage of craftsmanship and technology.”
An industrial-strength vacuum provides suction to clamp works in progress to a router table with an oversized 4- by 8-foot work surface. A stack of urethane-composite boards is destined for classy signs of the sort he has made welcoming visitors to Dobbs Ferry, Ardsley and Hastings-On-Hudson. The laser is in a glass-topped box, working far too fast for the eye to see and then finishing with a flourish of blue flame.
This is the world of Mr. Sign, 20 years ago part of a franchise and now independently owned, where Lenkowsky and “right-hand man” Scott Cooper make signs in scales spanning desk nameplates to the sides of tractor-trailers. A plaque by the shop door commemorates an Oh Henry! candy-bar design splashed in eye-catching glory across the flank of van. The effort won a national sign design award in 1989.
The bikes are good ones and each comes with a biography. Three of them see New York City streets and Lenkowsky, who caught the riding bug at age 4 via a cousin”™s scooter, offers his wisdom on Manhattan motorcycling: Cabs give him a wide berth on the big Harley ElectraGlide; the Buell S-3 1200 corners great, but is like a mosquito waiting to be swatted in the concrete canyons; the KTM 640 is “a hoot ”“ the ultimate urban combat vehicle.”
But for now, they and his other KTM, a 200cc lover of the deep woods; a two-stroke “spaghetti Harley” made in Italy in 1975; and his Harley Screamin”™ Eagle RoadGlide (one of only 750 ever made) are just sitting there: studies in full-throttle potential energy.
Unlike some bike collectors, these babies run. He toggles the starter of the Buell and it roars to life. He credits a love of engineering that he nurtured at Westchester Community College under professor Leonard Spina in the mechanical technology department with at least some of his acumen with machinery. “I can”™t say enough good things about Lenny. Westchester Community College was fantastic.” Spina is now the department”™s curriculum chairman.
With a solid background in auto and diesel technology, Lenkowsky discovered the sign business because he found custom motorcycle and race-car lettering difficult to obtain. “I had all these skills and I just fell into this,” he says. He bought a Mr. Sign franchise. The corporate Mr. Sign went bankrupt, but Lenkowsky plowed on as an independent who, 20 years on, receives 90 percent of his business via repeat customers. For most customers, they work up the design; he produces the product.
Bikers are notoriously straightforward and Lenkowsky bridles at indecisive customers and at multiple meetings with various planning boards around the county. In a more perfect world, startup business owners would not try to be so wildly and, at times, illegally creative and town planning boards would unify regulations countywide under four headings: commercial, historic, residential and industrial. “Changes are made by the 28 or 30 governing bodies around Westchester and we don”™t hear about it. Fortunately, I know some of the building departments and I call them to ask, ”˜Is this going to fly?”™” Above all, he says, avoid wood. “It expands. It contracts. It warps. That”™s why you have to paint your house; not because the paint breaks down.”
It”™s a busy world: riding a Harley across Alaska and making state-of-the-art signs. But for Lenkowsky, it”™s also a world that can use a little love. He does the Web and graphics work for the New York City Toys for Tots Motorcycle Toy Run campaign, the grassroots effort for sick and disabled kids that either touches a person deeply or that person is not a human. “A great thing,” he calls it. His Web site is www.mrsignny.com.
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