Expectation vs Reality - Coin Age Detailed Coins

Designing for 3D printing is a blast because occasionally you get these really groovy neat ideas that you can't wait to try out, and then you try it out, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

This is the story of a time it didn't work.
See, those coins I made last time I though would look better if the two sides had something distinctive about both sides. So I decided to cut little 0.1mm lines in a pattern in both sides. 0.2mm is the minimum distance you want to make things if you want them to separate. Of course separating wasn't my goal. I just wanted the slicer to have to trace lines in an otherwise solid surface. So I built some lines, used the solidify modifier to thicken them up, fought with the normals, fought some more with the boolean operator, and eventually had some coins that I thought would look pretty neat.

Unfortunately when it printed the lines ended up being much less distinct than I was hoping. In fact the only real effect it had was to make the sharp edges of the numbers look wiggly and uneven. Picture is the best that came out of that print, and trust me, it's even less impressive in real life.

So I'm going to go back to flat, unpaterned prints. Less cool, but better looking.

However, I've got an idea that might fix that bridging on the bottom side...