A monogram and engraving project

[simsmj]

Egg; I like the idea of an embossing stamp, but does that not require two interlocking stamps, and possibly shallower relief? I haven't looked into that, so that might be a silly question. It would certainly be a much less messy business.

ss-kalm; Once you have a suitable .stl file, you could print the stamp head in something that had enough physical integrity not to break. I think the weakness would be when levering the stamp off the wax. I've found that it can take some careful effort to release the stamp from the wax once it has cooled down. Layer separation can be a problem in 3d printing. Also the temperature of the molten wax would be similar to the melting temperature of the stamp itself, so distortion might be a problem too. I can see it being a finicky thing to get right, but plenty of people have been playing with 3d printers at a pretty deep technical level for some years now. In many ways it was the enthusiastic well-informed and innovative amateurs working in garages and back bedrooms for years with home made equipment that brought 3d printing to the masses. My CNC milling machine was itself designed by someone in a garage/basement/workshop at home, who eventually developed a thriving business selling kits and pre-built CNC milling machines. So it's entirely likely that someone has already done this.

I think you can already buy 3d-printed seals with sticky backs, and also actual wax seals with sticky backs? I have a 3d printer, which I recently bought, and I've only used it once so far, my son wanted a bust of Dante Alighieri for which he'd downloaded a .stl file. When I first opened the file up in the computer, I thought the file was empty, but noticed a tiny speck at the bottom of the screen. That was the model! It was only 1.3mm tall! But being a 3d vector file, I just scaled it up to about 11" which was the size my son deemed suitable, and printed that. But being my first time using it in earnest, I tested the model out at 5cm size, and that turned out well. The 11" one took about 4 hours from memory to complete, and it looked fine.

OK, that last was slightly off-topic! But I was going to say that it did occur to me that printing a seal itself would be pretty easy, and it could be made to look like an embossed blob of wax, or just be a clean disc with the emblem raised upon it. It would only require perhaps about five to ten layers, without looking into it. It would also be possible to print in wax itself if it had suitable properties that would allow it to be rendered into a filament that could be fed into the heated printhead nozzle with a suitable temperature.

Hah! Just googled it, and wax filament is a thing. I need to look into this further!

Edit, just checked my notes, the 11" bust took almost 26 hours!