Customizable Message Board Characters

thingiverse

I purchased an inexpensive message board awhile ago, which came with some letters and numbers and punctuation, but sometimes not nearly enough for the things I wanted to post on it. Then again, I thought it would be nice to have different sizes and colors of characters available. There are quite a few sets of message board letters available commercially, but none of them seemed to be particularly close to the typeface mine came with, and which I thought was rather elegant in its way. These message boards and letters (the boards in various sizes and shapes) have been sold at a few different stores, including Target. Anyhow, here's a fairly close re-creation of these letters, customizable for size and weight and in a few other ways. I include all the characters of the original, plus a few extra bonus characters and symbols: a longer dash, a degree sign, stars and arrows in a few sizes, and a heart. A couple characters have intentional differences from the originals: the at sign and dollar sign, which in the original characters are thinner than all the other characters. Some of the others do have subtle differences in the precise proportions, and for all of them the ends of the lines forming the characters are more rounded than the originals, which were somewhat squared off. The customizer produces files with various subsets of the characters, or all of them. Previewing sets with all the characters can lead to timeouts in the customizer, particularly if the hollow back option is chosen; usually working with the subsets instead prevents this. In either case, it's necessary to split the generated file apart into individual characters and adjust the quantities you wish to print manually; many programs are capable of doing that pretty easily (including Cura with the mesh tools add-on). It may be necessary to tweak the PegWidth, in particular, for your printer and message board to get a sufficiently secure but not excessively tight fit with your message board. Pre-built STLs are included for characters in 1/2", 3/4", 1", and 2" heights. The 1" ones are the same size and weight as the original letters, should you happen to have a message board with these particular characters already.