The Right Font For Vcarve

I plan on doing alot of vcarving on signs. I just wanted to see what fonts you guys use to vcarve letters.Thanks

On the one hand, V carving should allow one to do any font well, on the other, due to the limitation of a single fixed angle, it’s probably best to use a font with a fairly regular weight and thick/thin contrast so that the appearance of the bottom is reasonably regular.

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I know some fonts look better than others.

A lot of the font selection comes down to the situation (size of the letters, surrounding area, image you want to portray). For small text (1" or less), I find a fairly uniform line thickness with no overlapping letters, and rounded ends works best. Something like Arial rounded bold. For bigger letters you can get fancy, but you want a font that is made up of smooth lines. Some fancy fonts, like blackadder for example, have irregular edges that will look terrible when v-carved. For a fancy font I like to use “blacksword” from dafont.com.

It’s difficult to recommend any specific fonts because sometimes you just have to try them out to see what works. If the letters are too small and too close together, the carve may end up not leaving enough between the letter or the loops in the letters, so you just end up with a pocket. Plus, if you’re working in wood, even hardwood, you can get chip-out on thin spaces. It’s best when working with small text to overestimate how much space between letters that you need. You can always re-zero your Z 1/100" lower to get a thicker font after your first cut.

For really small letters, you may not want to use a TT font at all, but instead use a single line or double line font and then use a profile cut with a v-bit on those lines. Then you can control the depth. I recently did a carve with a single line font, 3/16" high letters, 90° v-bit, and a depth of 0.03". Came out really nice, but I wouldn’t go any smaller than that.

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Edwardian Script with Bold checked