Clones made in Draft can be resized in the data tab. This is super useful for creating offsets.

Yeah I’m aware of the resizable Draft clones. But in my case, it’s not helpful: in the case of the letter R for example, if I shrink it, the outside of the letter creates a gap but the inside of the letter invades the shell’s material. What’s needed here is moving surfaces inward - meaning outward vertical features move inward and inward vertical features move outward (and horizontal surfaces stay put) which is quite different from wholesale resizing.

You insert this print as you would with a nut or bearing inserted into the paused print and continue the print

I thought that’s what you meant. This is WAY too labor-intensive for my purpose: I print those tabs in batches of 256. I can’t imagine printing 256 tiny lettering inserts and manually placing them iin all 256 shells when the print pauses. That’s crazy!

Is this what Prusa does for their parts? They must be using slave labor or something. Then again, at the price their sell their wares, they can take a few minutes to manually insert parts into their prints…

If you have trouble with first layer crispness, print the lettering face up and use ironing to get a flatter crisper edge.

Face up looks very nice, even without ironing. The issue is, the shells have very thin (one line width) walls, and those would need support. That means carefully removing 256 supports for each batch of tabs, trying not to break the walls. Crazy amount of work. Not to mention, the wall’s height needs to be quite precise, and supports usually screws up with vertical dimensions bad, at least for the kind of precision I need here.

Someone else mentioned a 0.2mm nozzle. They are not as slow as one might imagine.

The real issue is, this is the company’s printer. It’s used for printing jigs and things. I’m really trying to avoid changing how it’s usually setup because I don’t want my colleagues and I to change the nozzles several times a day. Also, my boss thinks the markings as I print them now are good enough - which is true enough - so I can’t justify the expense of a smaller nozzle.

In short, I try to make the best of what the printer offers without modifying anything significant.