This morning Chris Siano from the UB sculpture dapartment was kind enough to help me plane down my piece of rough cut maple. The planing went easy enough – Chris has an amazing caliper that measures down to the thousandth of an inch, so getting everything just right proved to be a breeze. We planed the entire board down to around .785 inches, and when the letterforms are added, it brings everything just up to type height.
After planing the 4″ wide board, we ripped it down the center with the table saw, giving us two strips of just over 7′ that were close to 2″ wide. These pieces were then sent through the planer to achieve the standard dimension of 10 line type (1.666″).
Everything looked great UNTIL – I realized that some of the capital letters in the Winchell font extend beyond those dimensions. Specifically, characters with rounded edges at tops and bottoms (O, Q, U, S, C, G) show a tiny bit of overhang. So the I, L, T, A, etc. all fit perfectly, but the O, Q, U, S, C, G have set up another obstacle. Time to make a decision about whether or not this overhang is acceptable or if certain caps need to be scaled down a fractional amount so that they’ll fit on the block. In the interest of time (it’ll take a while to resize each letter in Autocad) and money (I already have a number of these letterforms complete) I’m leaning towards forgiving the minor overhang.
