Pencil Guides for Ruler Quilting

Mary has been doing Ruler Quilting and wanted a pencil guide (similar to the machine’s ruler foot) to let her sketch layouts before committing stitches to fabric. The general idea is to offset the pencil by 1/4 inch from the edge of the ruler:

Ruler Adapter - solid model — Ruler Adapter – solid model

That was easy.

Print three to provide a bit of cooling time and let her pass ’em around at her next quilting bee:

Ruler Adapter - Slic3r preview — Ruler Adapter – Slic3r preview

Her favorite doodling pencil shoves a 0.9 mm lead through a 2 mm ferrule, so ream the center hole with a #44 drill (86 mil = 2.1 mm) to suit:

The outer perimeters have 64 facets, an unusually high number for my models, so they’re nice & smooth on the ruler. Even though I didn’t build them sequentially, they had zero perimeter zits and the OD came out 0.500 inch on the dot.

The chamfers guide the pencil point into the hole and provide a bit of relief for the pencil’s snout.

If I had a laser cutter, I could make special rulers for her, too …

The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:

	// Quilting Ruler Adapters
	// Ed Nisley KE4ZNU October 2016

	//- Extrusion parameters must match reality!

	ThreadThick = 0.25;
	ThreadWidth = 0.40;

	HoleWindage = 0.2;

	Protrusion = 0.1; // make holes end cleanly

	inch = 25.4;

	function IntegerMultiple(Size,Unit) = Unit * ceil(Size / Unit);

	//———-
	// Dimensions

	ID = 0;
	OD = 1;
	LENGTH = 2;

	Offset = 0.25 * inch;

	Template = [2.0,2*Offset,3.0];

	NumSides = 16*4;
	HoleSides = 8;

	//———————-
	// Useful routines

	module PolyCyl(Dia,Height,ForceSides=0) { // based on nophead's polyholes
	Sides = (ForceSides != 0) ? ForceSides : (ceil(Dia) + 2);
	FixDia = Dia / cos(180/Sides);
	cylinder(d=(FixDia + HoleWindage),h=Height,$fn=Sides);
	}


	//———-
	// Build it

	difference() {
	cylinder(d=Template[OD],h=Template[LENGTH],$fn=NumSides);
	translate([0,0,-Template[LENGTH]])
	PolyCyl(Template[ID],3*Template[LENGTH],HoleSides);
	translate([0,0,-Protrusion])
	cylinder(d1=2*Template[ID],d2=Template[ID],h=Template[LENGTH]/3 + Protrusion,$fn=HoleSides);
	translate([0,0,Template[LENGTH] + Protrusion])
	mirror([0,0,1])
	cylinder(d1=2*Template[ID],d2=Template[ID],h=Template[LENGTH]/3 + Protrusion,$fn=HoleSides);
	}

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Pencil Guides for Ruler Quilting

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