Dana and I went to the “No Kings” protest last weekend, and I asked if she wanted one of the signs I made, or if she wanted to come up with something. She didn’t have any ideas until Friday night, so I rushed to get a sign made for her Saturday morning. Here it is! If you haven’t seen Daniel’s comments, check it out.
To make the sign I started in Inkscape with an Tabloid (11″x17″) canvas, and typed out the words. My plan was to 3D print the letters and us them for the stencil.
The red squares represent the size of the print bed on my 3D printer. I could not print the whole thing in one go so I broke it into two sections…
Here’s the first section. I brought the SVG into OpenSCAD and extruded it 1.5mm tall. Once I did that I exported an STL file I could print.
With the letters printed in black filament I put them down on the tabloid size foam core board to act as a stencil. With the letters being 1.5mm tall they had enough weight I didn’t need to worry about the paint blast blowing them away.
Spray Spray Spray! Paint goes on, letters (in place) stay. I let things dry for a bit…
Then removed the letters. A sign! I did think that it might have been fun to just glue on the 3D printed letters, though that would have added a little more weight to it. Still, ideas for the future… especially with multi-color printing. But again, I wanted to make a sign fast.
For good measure I added a 3D printed handle to the sign. I tweaked a design someone else threw together but I’m working on my own version now.