Sign Making - Nickerbocker NF Regular Letters by The_Redcoat

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

A less obvious use for 3D printers is to create 2D-ish signage for walls, doors, gift cards or other crafts. It's fast, clean, and effective.
This is a collection of 95 letters, numbers, and symbols extruded with a high-arc quality, ready to print. I have chosen this font because it is print-suitable and sign-readable. It is based on a font by Nicks Fonts from https://www.fontspace.com/nickerbocker-nf-font-f10187 which itself is licensed as Freeware. It has a deco vibe.
Letters can be scaled to modify overall dimensions, aspect ratio or depth in your slicer (limited only by the size of your print bed). In my tests, 3 layers at 0.32mm provides a "flat" letter that won't deform and can be glued to a variety of backgrounds using E6000 or UHU type glues. If you aren't good at hand kerning, do go grab the font to see how the font expects it to look. This is also where you will go to preview the shapes of letters, numbers and symbols that I didn't include in the sample image.
Remember to flip/mirror the lettering if your visible surface is to be your print surface. I expect this would be the norm except for some metallic silk filaments where the top can look better. If you aren't finishing them with spray-paint etc., experiment and take care to slice top/bottom surfaces with appropriate patterns (again, more important with metallic filaments). For a 3 layer 'flat' letter, try using 30 perimeters and no top/bottom fill, also experiment with just some pretty infills and no top/bottom layers on deeper lettering.
If you are printing letters that stretch the limit of your bed, be sure to find the largest/widest letter first, scale to fit, then print the others at the same scale.
For creating stencil positives (for airbrushing, or aerosol bleach onto denim etc.) then just two layers at 0.32mm will probably be stiff enough.