Standard font for silver?

I am designing a silver model just under the 30 x 30mm size maximum. So its expensive. I want to emboss or engrave lettering on it. I am worried about the letters being too small or too close together. I want to avoid rejections on print as much as possible to avoid weeks of delays and high wasted costs. Referring to the image can any of you experienced designers out there provide advice on:

1. Most fonts do not have block lettering in which all the letters are the same face width throughout the letter surface? I can't seem to find a good block letter font. Having the width the same would make things much easier in terms of minimum detail thickness. Are any of you using any standard block fonts I might have overlooked?

2. Any advice on fonts that make the 0.6mm distance between details a little easier to deal with? I might just take Courier New and chop off the rounded corners to make my own set of letters. This might be a little painful in terms of positioning letters to make up names or sentences. But maybe that's the best way. Have any of you used this approach? It would sure be easier if I can find a font in which the letters were completely symmetrical and just type in the words and sentences. But I want to be sure it meets minimum standards to make sure its repeatable for the customer.

3. I might just be over thinking the distance between details. Does the 0.6mm spacing apply to distances between embossed and engraved lettering?

Any and all advice is much appreciated.

I'm not sure I'm reading your question correctly but here goes: If the spaces between letters is 3.6mm you will have NO problem with this. What IS important is the vertical wall of the lettering - raised or recessed. Let's suppose you have a 1mm cube that you wish to raise off the surface. If you make the vertical walls of that cube 1mm or less you should have no problem, but if you make them more than 1mm you will start to have problems.

I personally use either Arial or Arial Black depending on the size of my model.

Remember that 0.6mm is just over half a mm - that's really small.

I have printed many models in silver and quite a few with lettering with no disappointments. I even had lettering in stainless steel that really pushed the envelope but that still looked acceptable.

Silver is great to work with.

And if you have any doubts because you really hit the design limits then send the model to customer service for them to analyse. I did this with a model I had to re-print. I say that because I wouldn't want customer service suddenly flooded with requests to okay models before uploading them.

Glenn

Thanks Glen,

That helps. What I ran into was some parts of the letters are more narrow than others, which triggered rejection. At those locations the minimum detail was too small. For example the E,R, and R on this image. I think I just made them too small in the first place. The problem was I had designed the entire model already. So when I went to scale them up the text didn't fit anymore. So I made my own set of symmetrical letters and corrected it. Next time if I am making really small text I'll use the most narrow point as a the minimum.

Just how small were they? And were the letters raised or recessed too much?

Glenn

Not sure anymore because my version control on that file got out of control as I overwrote the file a couple times now. It may have just been me.

My biggest concern is repeatability at this point. I think I am going to go in the opposite direction of pushing the limits. I keep reading about folks who have had things printed many times before only to find the models are no longer printable. That's a nightmare scenario for what I plan to do in terms of keeping customers. I had been making models that were exactly at the minimum details standards and got some rejections here and there. So I think from now on I'll add a % factor to the minimum details standard safety.

I appreciate your responses very much.