Newbie Question - Scanned in Drawing

[terry]

Well I am now entering the "LEARNING CURVE" zone.
Here's my first project: A bar support bracket.
I have been making these by hand till now. I traced the shape on a peice of paper, scanned it into my computer, then into an older version of Sign Lab, did a manual trace,(very rough) transfered it to TurboCad and cleaned up the trace, then tried to open the file in Sign Lab again and what it shows is nothing like the what I drew. So, whats a better way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance,
Terry

[beacon14]

Draw it in PartWizard would be the simplest way, or draw it in TurboCAD and export as .dxf; import to PartWizard.

With simple shapes like molding profiles I find it's usually easier and more accurate to just measure and draw them instead of trying to scan and then having to redraw anyway.

[srwtlc]

If you have CorelDraw, you can scan your trace into there and use the bezier tool to drop nodes and then bend and shape them until you have what you want. I find that the the tools for bezier curves in CorelDraw are easier to tweak around to get those nice free form shapes than in TurboCad or PW. Export out of there as .eps or .dxf. You should also be able to insert a .jpg into TurboCad and then trace around it with a spline or bezier.

[kr_fitz]

Terry,

I do this all the time. The system I have worked out works well for me. I scan the tracing, then import into Rhino (View|Background Bitmap|Place). I trace over the drawing usually with Curve: Interpolate Points. Scale the drawing to the proper size and save as AI. Import into Part Wizard, toolpath and generate your SB file. You can download a fully function (25 save) version of Rhino for free at www.rhino3d.com (http://www.rhino3d.com).

Or you can do the same thing in TurboCad and it should work fine. Why are you bringing the file back into Sign Lab? Do you have Part Wizard?

-Kevin

[paco]

Hey guys!

Here another "FREE" CAD (http://www.a9tech.com) that allows "tracing over an image"...

[terry]

Thanks for the response guys.
I used SignLab because I couldn't get PW to acept the file from TurboCad. But after the above posts I tried again in TurboCad and this time used the spline tool, saved in DFX and PW imported it perfectly. Took all of 5 mins. Don't know what I was doing wrong the first time. Thanks for the link to rino and the free cad. I may try those out.

Thanks again till next time.
Terry

[phil_o]

I've used Corel Draw to trace an image, save as a DXF file and when I open in PW the lines are double. Then I have a lot of work to do in PW to get rid of the doubles. If anyone has a solution I would like to know of it.

[srwtlc]

Phil, try exporting as a different .dxf version (r14 or lower) and make sure you don't have an outline applied to the lines in Corel. If you were able to look at that double line file in 3D, you may see that one set of lines is about five inches higher (in z) than the other. I've had that happen and that can really mess you up.

[David Arde (Unregistered Guest)]

In corel draw I,ve only ran into the double line thing with text. Mabe this will work. Before you save as a dxf do a convert to curve in Corel. (control q)This clears up the double line in the text for me.