Creating an N-Gauge Pub sign

July 19, 2021

Most of the things I create don’t have a specific gauge, either because they are not based on reality or that the accuracy will not be noticed. My latest project is a small model diorama based on a town alleyway full of shops so the parts needed good relative scales. I am looking at putting a little forced perspective in place so the things at the back of the scene will seem further away than they are. The gauge I’ve picked is “N-Guage” which is also known as 2mm as it is 1:148 or 2mm to 1ft.

One of the main buildings is a pub so for this, I need a pub sign. I’ve picked out a cardboard kit of some timber-framed buildings and will customise these to meet the need. And I sketched a rough idea for the sign. If my sign is 1m square then that equates to 1000mm / 148 = 6.75mm. A really tiny sign, so we needed to keep the detail pretty low. The fixings will also need to be made a bit bigger than scale so they can be created on the 3D printer.

To model this in FreeCAD I started with a sketch and built the frame and sign body using rectangles then added the scroll and cauldron using splines.

This does not make one continual outline and hence can’t be used with the PAD tool. So I duplicated the sketch and broke it into parts, ensuring to join up any gaps.

The frame part needed to have the internal hole removed and then added back as a separate sketch and some detailing was also added to this part. Each of the sketches were padded to create a solid object.

Finally the objects were overlapped and then fuzed using the boolean operator. And exported as an STL file for printing.

By Andy from Workshopshed 2 Comments

  Posted in: CAD