Model Railroading > BN(SF) 40’ COIL CARe car (Part 10) – Fonts the Easy Way

This is Part 10 of a series on the BN(SF) COIL CARe car.  (Parts 1 thru 9 were posted earlier.)
 
Turns out there are 3 flavors of stencil fonts on the As Delivered BN COIL CARe car; small, medium, and large.  Trying to find a match for each will be a trick.

Marsh
Fortunately, the small font is a relatively standard font used by most of the companies that made stencil machines back in the day.  Though a modern stencil could be cut with a laser, the Old School stencil machines select the letter by rotating a large dial, and then pressed downward on a lever to cut the letter out of the card.  The cards were pre-oiled, to lubricate the cutting dies.  One company that manufactured these stencil machines was the Marsh Company.  This font bears their name:
https://befonts.com/marsh-font.html
 
It is a super-close match for the smaller lettering.
 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/17/22 23:52 by tmotor.

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Not To Scale
Though both the large and medium fonts use the radial webbing, they cannot be merely scaled up and down.  They were cut on 2 different stencil machines, which is why the fonts differ.  A comparison of the letter “M” shows the difference.  Fortunately, the larger font is only used for the Load Limit data and “New 9-95”.   Their lettering is large enough that I was able to get clear images of them.   This allowed me to BitMap Trace them, similar to the COIL CARe car logo.  They are treated like a large graphic, so building a new font with individual characters was not needed for the large stencil. 

What The Font
Unfortunately, the medium and large stencils have an unusual radial webbing, and a match for their fonts was nowhere to be found.  I even tried this site that has a massive database of fonts:
https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont

I drag-n-dropped an image of a few words (from the COIL CARe car) onto their site, and it isolated the text from the background.  It then performed a search of its database, and displayed some stencil fonts.  One had radial webbing, but the pattern was not a match, unfortunately. 
 
After searching for hours through 100’s of stencil fonts, I came to the conclusion that the medium stencil font would need to be a DIY project.
 
Dave



Edited 9 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/22 01:06 by tmotor.

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