Monday, December 22, 2008

Making letters


Auld Reekie
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
My Dad is just finishing a Clyde Puffer kit and since he is colourblind, I've been handling the painting duties. I also get to apply the name to the boat since "You get on better with those letters than I do.".

So yesterday I was using my normal method of letter a boat when I hit a snag. The part used BEC lettering sheet may have had enough E's on it, good news considering the number of them in the name, it didn't have enough U's. I was precisely one short.

Now I want to see this boat finished, it's been 10 years in the building thanks to some long periods on the shelf while other projects take precedence. It's very nearly there though and this is the final push. Ordering a new sheet of sticky letters during the Christmas period wasn't going to be a good idea.

Scanning the sheet for something I could make a U out of I decided after a fair bit of measuring that the best bet was the bottom curve of an S (the last on the sheet) with verticals from the supplied dashed line. Several other characters were either slightly too wide or too narrow. To be honest the variety of letter widths both surprised and frustrated me.

A bit of poking around with a sharp scalpel has given me a reasonably neat result. This vessel is intended to sail rather than live in a glass case anyway so anyone close enough to notice will have wet feet !

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good thinking, and thanks for the idea. I'll be working on lettering for a railcar soon and was wondering how to do it...