Mini Lettering

Thanks Bob. I'd tried Arial Rounded Bold MT; Cooper Std Black, etc without any luck. Do you think that it makes a difference in how the original design is made? For example I used a black background and white letters, then inverted the picture (both in photoshop before hand, and in ipicture itself). What I needed was a white background with black lettering, I'm making a "box" with drink recipes carved into the wood and a glass tube inside, so you can mix party size drinks without a measuring cup. Getting the right height of each ingredient takes some playing around, which I did. And now it's driving me crazy because I can't get it to carve.

Rick, I have found that most boards if not all are never actually an even thickness whether store bought or ran thru my planer. Using digital calipers to measure all around a piece of lumber you will get all kinds of readings, which when you are trying to carve small and shallow depth items this might account for the failure to carve as well as planned. Most of the stuff I carve is set to carve at the depth of 4-5 mm, and when I am setting up in the machine I have a pointed machinists alignment tool that I use to place a small recess at my origin point. I then can set the Z depth on the machine to be slightly lower than the surface so that I end up with an even carve. I know you could just drive Z setting into the wood a bit, but I do not want to put any stress on the motor by applying pressure in the Z direction.

I have a marine corps design the has the words "semper fidelis" in it and when carved each these letters are only at best around a 16th" wide and tall, none the less they do carve faintly but enough to read them.

I made this one:



Segoe semi bold and marketing script, only blurred by 3

I did note that when adding the text layers that in order to get them in the right position they actually overlapped on some which might have a bearing on how they would carve if you did your blur individually, I waited until the whole thing was done and did an overall blur, just slightly since I figure you are wanting to fill the lettering.

Gonna start from scratch and redo everything:
1. Seguo SemiBold lettering
2. "Word Art" text which will allow me to adjust the size of the text to meet the piece
3. Reduce the center peep hole to give me more space on the sides for lettering
4. Screw the piece to the sacrificial board rather than double sided tape, hopefully this will take out some of the cupping in 1/4" boards and pull it flat.
5. Put the z start setting right at the wood without any spacing. I'll sand out any scratches if I get decent lettering.
6. Gausian blur at 2.0

Here's hoping for improvement. I got concerned that I'd redone the piece so many times and different ways on the computer that this might be causing some of the problems. Another problem Bob's msg brought to my mind is the slight cupping I had in the wood, much of the problems I was having was on the outside edges which were slightly lower than the cupped middle where my origin is. I'll post when this latest attempt finishes next week.

Try, try and try again, glad to see it has worked out for you....Pics?

Here's another example of working with mini letters. My son built a play table for his daughter, and has led sidelighting built in for a plexiglas center. Being a big Princess fan, he put forth her favorite movies in the plexiglass. Starting out with titles downloaded off the web, I ran into the same mini lettering problem with this as I did with my wooden drink mixer. The letter font in many titles just has too many very thin lines in them, which wouldn't carve no matter the depth that I chose. It also happened often in the "and the" portion of the titles because they were so much smaller than the rest. I finally did several titles that were giving me problems on my own in Publisher, Princess and the Frog for example, and used Segoe Semi Bold font for the main lettering. This has wider channels in the font, and therefore gives ipicture something better to work with. Final carving here was at z= .125, and came out pretty well. The only thing, and it came out ok, was the Aladdin title which is in the original font.....the "A" didn't cut as deep as I'd liked. Each piece took 19 hours (12 x 12 piece) to carve on low, and I carved it six times before getting it right.

Lettering continues to be a problem for me, one that I basically got around by using WordArt in MS Publisher in a small font (18), then stretched the wording out to make each letter larger in the body. Each side of the finished product presented the same problem over and over, but I finally figured out a fix and got the job done. This is something I wanted for myself, and I've been working on it (off and on) since last October.

We like our Sangria at our lake place, and we drink it by the pitcher from a special recipe that we have - you can't drive heavy machinery after one or two glasses with it's potency. What we have here is a mixer made in corian, with a glass tube in the middle. You fill each ingredient to the proper line, and when you reach the top the pitcher size drink is finished - great every time. Minimum cleanup, and it makes the creation of the second and third pitcher a night possible - even through blurry eyes.