3D printing button legends and panel labels

[TConnolly]

Do any of you 3D print your button legends? How did that work out?

 

[BryanG]

Yes labels, no for buttons. I am a beginner with 3D printing so if an expert sees this they may say "bl**dy obvious" to some of my findings.
When you print, the bottom of the label tends to come out nice and flat, so that seemed like the obvious side to have on view. I had a mate try printing with the text cut out, so it would be like an engraving, but a thing called "elephants foot" where the bottom of a print spreads a little made them look nasty. I figured a two colour printer might fix the elephants foot, so I could print the letters and fill them all at the same time. It ended up with a smudged mess. Plan C, was to print the text on top of the label.
The Font is very important, no Serifs, no sticky out bits, all parts of a letter to be the same width. I started with Arial, but the parts of a letter aren't all the same size, and I think it was the letter 'I' that wasn't closed and caused 'not water tight' errors. I eventually found Roboto truetype font on a Linux virtual machine that seems to work.
Even then you need to make sure that the width of a letter part works as a multiple of the printing head diameter. So for example with a 0.4mmm head I needed 0.4mm or 0.8mm or more as the letter parts widths. I had to play with different styles of Bold or Black in the font family to get a width that worked with the space I had for the text. You also need to increase the spacing between letters or they smudge in to each other.
Finally I had issues with the white lettering 'feathering' and leaving ghostly lines over the print, I mostly fixed it by reducing the head temperature for that material.
For a normal sized and thickness label at normal print speeds you are looking at 20mins or more per label.

The device in the picture is 45mm diameter, letters are about 5.5mm high. I could improve things by going to a 2.5mm head, but that would be another £95.00 :-(.
My final concern for using these as Panel Labels would be that the surface isn't smooth and will collect dirt, or in a food environment lots of places for bugs to grow.

For the job I am using them for it is a good solution, I can keep almost everything in-house, I can give the customer better prices. For panel labels I think I will still be calling the engraver.