Does anyone know where I can get a SolidWorks or other cad file of this kind of type?
I thought it would be an easy search, but after killing about 20+ mins Googling, I thought asking here might be better.
Thanks guys, I considered an extrude with draft, and have used it in the past.
Extrude with draft produces a consistent offset, and the flat peak of the letter may vary in width, or in some areas, be eliminated. I was just trying to explore other options if the customer did not want something that differed significantly from the existing.
Create your text in a sketch on the surface. Then extrude with offset. Extrude back toward the face with Draft Outward. The flat peak of every letter will match the sketch text exactly.
From what I understand, draft for typical sand casting can be 5 to 7 degrees. For some reason the letters in my image are about 20 - 25 degrees based on visual comparisons made by entering various angles until it looks pretty close on a simple test shape.
The largest draft angle I can get using the default SolidWorks Century Gothic Regular font is about 15 degrees, with a similar height to depth ratio, before the extrude fails. (This is applied to all the upper case letters and numerals)
So maybe the customer can live with 15 degrees ...
But lets say they really want 20 degrees for their application,
I would have to modify the letters/numbers that fail, and then they may not be visually consistent with the rest. Or I just model each letter as it is in the 3d scan and charge them appropriately.
You do not need that large of a draft angle for something with very little height. At least we do not for larger features, all of our castings do not have more than 3 degrees draft. But we stamp the text in, and it doesn't look all too fancy. Maybe to get good looking casted text you need some larger draft angles.
3 degrees is what I have measured also on castings I have reverse engineered, but I was looking for cases where the draft angle requirement was greater. I have not needed to put text/numerals on any of the work I have done to this point so I was curious as to what others were doing.
I did some searching and in some cases the largest draft angle requirement was stated at 5 to 7 degrees, but could not find any mention of 20 degrees. Maybe its completely unnecessary.
