Emboss with a draft Angle? Or another way to extrude text with a taper/draft angle on a curved surface?

[kmcgheeCMFPG]

I have included a picture of my project. I have a student whos father was in the military and he wanted to make him a simple trailer hitch cover of a Claymore Mine.

We want to 3d print it and sand cast it then weld a 2x2 tube to it. So far we have it drawn with all the taper/draft angles needed to pull from the sand, and the first print releases from the sand perfectly except the text.  It tears out the text as I can't figure out a way to add taper/draft angle to the text. I used the emboss tool to make the text curved on the surface (blue area is the curved surface) but there is no taper/draft angle in that tool. Any other way to do this? Any way to project the text onto curved surface then I can just use extrude with a 3 degree taper/draft angle?

[jhackney1972]

The letter wall surfaces are too tight to establish a 3 degree taper angle, they will intersect in a lot of places, inside the "R" for example at your text thickness of 0.0625.  Maybe a taper from the base of the letter to the top will work.  It will reduce the letter top size, is that OK?

[kmcgheeCMFPG]

Thanks, I ended up chamfering each letter, the letter height and 3 degrees and it worked. So I am printing it right now to see if it works.

[jhackney1972]

Here it is with a 10 degree negative taper from your text to the top.  I doubt if 3 degrees will be enough to pull free of the mold.

[kmcgheeCMFPG]

This looks great, I use 3 degrees for most things but 5 -10 is ok too. How did you do this exactly, I do this alot with belt buckles but always flat, if the workflow is good I want to start doing this by default.

[jhackney1972]

I will not be able to do a demo video until tomorrow evening as I will be traveling until then.  I am located in the Eastern Time Zone in the USA just to give a time reference.  I will get back to you.

[jhackney1972 · Accepted solution]

I found a few minutes this morning to do the promised video.  One thing I pointed out, in the video, is that you can remove the flat sheet behind the buckle if needed but in this case it is not necessary since it can be combined with the buckle base material.  In such a short text extrude distance, 10 degrees is not unreasonable but any taper angle can be used.  I realized that I forgot to drag the timeline back to the end to bring back the finishing fillets in the video.  Before doing that, you must click on the Emboss operation and remove it.  You have my model from a previous post so I will not attach it again.

Please do not forget to select the "Accept Solution" icon on my post if this seems to solve your question.

[Kalewhoo71!]

The font is destroyed in that method. Although, I have used this technique prior it has been only for resin casting which used flexible molds. For injection molding, it will not work unless you over draft to the specific material requirements. The goal should be to to offset the font and extrude down with a draft that goes outward. Right now and for a long time Fusion 360 and many others cannot do this without a ton of work in surface mode. I have literally spent 2 days working on serif letters with draft of 10 degrees. It boggles my mind that I can manually make it work slowly but programs cannot calculate this on their own. We know it self intersects as some point. Find the best combination of those areas to fillet out and present a viable draft. If I had one complaint about this program it would be text with draft on compound curved surfaces, let alone flat surfaces. It should not be that difficult. At least the program should have some standard fonts that can be used with draft with no issues that require the depth of manual effort that I have to do consistently.

Try this extruding text on a ball well past the mid point with the draft being on one axis and you will find a special type of hell that I live in yearly.