I love the style of letterboard signs but wanted some more flexibility than store bought models provide. 

With this customizable design you can:

• Choose any dimensions for you base board and frame. You can even create boards much larger than the print volume of your printer as the maker will automatically split the board into multiple pieces if needed.
• Select any font the parametric model maker supports or any font you have installed on your local computer if you run the .scad file locally
• Upload any SVG and have it automatically fit your letterboard grooves
• Adjust tolerances so that the letters are as tight or loose of a fit as you want
• Print exactly the text you need

Good to know + Tips:

• Unfortunately at the moment the model maker does not like downloading .3mf files which exceed a certain volume so you should chose the option to download STL instead. For now you will have to manually set the filament colors for the frame and base. An easier way to go about this until they support .3mf for larger models is to use the `include_x` parameters to download seperate STLs for the parts that should be different colors

  

• The fit of the letters can vary a bit depending on font, font size, filament etc. To deal with this you can use the Text_Tollerance variable to make adjustments to the characters generated so they fit tighter or looser on the board. The Idea is that the characters should be tight enough to not fall out when the board stands vertical, but loose enough that you can move them around if needed.

• There is an option to include connectors when making boards which need to be split into multiple plates. I would recommend gluing the base parts and frame parts together on large boards, but the connectors will work in a pinch and can also really help keeping things together when gluing large boards
   

  

• If you need small punctuation or languages that have accents it may be best to change the Advanced Settings and make the `groove_width` and `groove_gap` smaller, allowing for more smaller characters. You can see i have done this with the micro letter board in the pictures. You can also generate just the punctuation at a larger font size to make it easier to fit the board, this is what I did with the period on the coffee shop sign.
• If you want a font that is not supported by the model maker, you can run the .scad file locally and replace the `font_name` variable with the name of a font on your local machine. This is what i have done with the cursive font in the pictures
• If you change the Advanced Settings you should keep track of the values you use for the board so you can later generate the correct letters again if needed. If you don't change the Advanced Settings you should not need to worry about those values or keep track of them
   

Adjusting Tolerances

1. On a desktop computer you can navigate to the models page and click the "Customize" button. Select Letterboard.scad and click the "Customize" button again.

   

2. This will open up the model maker where there are a lot of different settings you can adjust. If you just want letters that are a bit tighter on the board, you can toggle off "Frame", "Base", and "SVG" as in the second image below so only "Text" is included in the download. If you click "Generate" now you will see that only the text is shown in the right window.
   
3. On the left side, open the "Text Settings" drop down. Here you can adjust the font, font size, specify specific text you want, etc. To make the letters tighter on the board you will want to find the "Text Tollerance" setting and adjust it. The value is in mm so the default value of 0.03mm means that there is a 0.03mm of wiggle room between the letters and the board. Since the letters are too tight for you, we need to lower this, I would suggest starting at setting it to 0, and if they are still too tight after that you can try -0.05, -0.1... and so on until you find the right settings for you printer and filaments.
   
4. Click "Generate" followed by "Download" and “Download STL”,Open the downloaded STL in Bambu Studio or another slicer and print!
    

For Large Boards

When creating boards that exceed the specified Plate Size like in the images below, the frame and board will be automatically split into the correct number of pieces. In the tool these splits will be extremely small so you won't be able to see them directly in the tool but when you take it it into Bambu studio and Split the object into parts, you will see the different pieces.

Here is how it looks in the model maker:

Directly after import:

After splitting object into parts and auto arranging