I’ve been very remiss in posting projects. I’m Sorry!
Here’s a recent one. My niece and my cousin were chatting about Harriet Tubman being considered for the $20 bill and how that was put on hold for REASONS. (we won’t go into that here)
As they (and I ) think it’s sad that it’s not happening soon, they found that some folks are making Harriet Tubman ink stamps sized just right for “fixing” the $20 bills in circulation, and as making them requires both 3-D printing as well as laser etching, they called yours truly.
The project files were posted on Thiniverse by some nice guy (I’ll dig up the link if you need) so it wasn’t TOO much work. In fact the SVG provided was kind of … messy … (a kajillion extra nodes, and hundreds of paths) and so I did what was probably far more Inkscape work than was needed and boiled it down to one path with a manageable number of nodes while maintaining the detail needed.
After that, it was just a matter of fabricating. The 3-D print of the handle was easy; I think it will be prone to breaking with too vigorous stamping, but I told them to be careful.
The ink stamp printing was a first for me and, wow, am I glad I have a booster exhaust fan. That rubber smell is pretty tough. I found some recommended sheet rubber from Amazon, worked well enough.
I dialed in the settings lifted from fine folks on this forum, and engraved/cut, and that was that. Super glue to attach the handle and the stamp and we were done.
I’m now looking for other reasons to make stamps, the result turned out better than I thought it would and it was a lot of fun.
Let me know if anyone wants further details.
Sorry, after all that, I didn’t have a $20 on hand to try it out. Irony!
Just to head off any concern: stamping paper money is a completely legal and harmless bit of civil disobedience. As long as the denomination remains clearly discernible and the image isn’t offensive (both true in this case) then it’s fine.
I do hope that this raises awareness to my fellow Americans as to what a bad-*ss superhero Madam Tubman was.
UPDATE: I was super busy for the last few days and didn’t notice that this post had a lot of activity (relative to my other posts; “low bar”, yea yea…)! I’m working my way though the comments now but my immediate takeaway was that there might be some value to posting my file and some production notes over in the Free Designs category, which I’ve done. I’m very happy to share this and I hope some of you find it useful. Thanks!