In New England, your vacation house is a “Camp” even when some of them are quite grand. A tradition is that you can post your name on a sign at the turnoff of the road leading to your property. This means the turnoff for your “camp” often will have a dozen or so name signs in various states of repair.
A buddy of mine is a “Pattern Maker” - he makes wooden patterns for sand casting. Like turbine housings and old decorative features and such. I am always impressed to see the blue print turned into a pattern - which then is used to create the mold for the sand cast of some metal. It is a dying profession, edged out by 3d printing, CNC and such.
My buddy asked if I could whip up some letters for his ‘camp’ sign, that he could then use to create the pattern for the sand cast, with the final sign in aluminum. He gave me the rough size he was looking for - 24 " wide with the letters about 1/2 inch high.
Hence the two images in the picture. The letters I created and the the finished result.
To make 1/2 inch letters easily, I used two layers of hardboard. I love hard board. It is cheap and lets me test burn a lot before using pretty wood.
The letters I whipped up in Inkscape. That would have been really quick, except I wanted two layers with the topmost inset a bit. And I wanted registration holes so I could line up the letters. Oh, yes, and because the letters ended up about 24 inches wide, I wanted to cut them in two passes, preserving the waste outline so that we could preserve the original font layout/spacing. I had some real issues with Inkscape losing the letters when I inset, but I finally got it to work with outset.
I was pretty happy with the result. I tried a bunch of fonts and liked this one the best. The stair step on the edge of the letters is a “high end detail you pay extra for” (said another of my friends). The family was very pleased with the result - it exceeded what they expected.
All in all, a fun day with Inkscape and the Glowforge.
