Drilling holes in heart shape

[waynelocke]

I need to space 5/16" holes about 3" apart 1.5 inches inside of a 3' X 4' heart shape. Can anyone point me in the right direction with Vector or Parts Wizard.

[Brady Watson]

Wayne,
You can set up an even spaced snap grid by going under the 2D Settings menu at the near the top of the screen. * and/or* If you place your cursor on the numbered guide above the work area and to the left, you can drag down a guideline to align your vectors. You can make as many as you want and conversely can drag them back to the top or left to get rid of one.

Place horizontal and vertical guidelines where you want your holes to be placed. Then create your 5/16 circles and drag them over to where the X and Y guidline intersections are. The cursor crosshairs will chance to a 'circled +' telling you that the center of the circle will be placed at the intersection.

If you get to the point where there are too many guidelines on the screen and/or they obstuct the view of the vectors, click the # symbol under the 3D view button to hide the guidelines. Click it again to turn it back on.

Hope that helps.

-Brady

[waynelocke]

Thanks Brady but I was trying to regularly space the holes around a heart shape. I think you a step ahead of me.
Wayne

[srwtlc]

Wayne,

Here's how I would do it with Vector. First off, make your heart in some other program that is easier than Vector for making a nice bezier curve (CorelDraw or a Cad program where you can tweak the shape easily), then open the saved dxf in Vector and make your 1.5" offset. Then drag your axis to the point at the bottom of the heart, draw a circle with a radius of 3" and another one with a radius of 5/32", then copy both of those circles, switch off all snap modes except "intersection", drag the axis to the next intersection and paste the two circles there, drag axis, paste again, drag axis, paste again, ect. until you get halfway around. Then drag the axis back to the bottom point and select just your 5/16" circles, copy and paste mirroring in x. If you are going to just peck drill the holes you could do the same thing with points. After you have what you want, just delete the reference circles and anything else you don't want.

There may be other ways, but this one is the first that came to mind and it was quick to do.

I hope that I have understood what it is that you are wanting to do and that this helps.

Scott

[dingwall]

Scott's method +1

[ron brown]

Wayne,

RHINO has a feature that will put points on a curve by number of segments. Your easiest method would be to e-mail me the file if you don't have RHINO and I'll spend a couple of minutes on it and send it back.

Ron

[wiese]

Wayne,

AutoCAD also has a feature that will do what Ron described.

Jay

[beacon14]

My first impulse was to use the same method as Scott described (except I use DesignCad). After thinking about it some more, I realize that the accuracy of that method will be greater where the line is close to straight (the bottom half of the heart shape), but as you work around the curved areas of the top of the heart, you will be placing points at the ends of 3" long arcs around the curve, not 3" apart along the curve. It may not matter, but if is does, some manual tweaking may be needed to adjust the spacing. If DesignCad has a function to do what Ron and Jay describe, I haven't discovered (or needed) it yet.

David B

[srwtlc]

I don't know David, it looks good to me. The centers of each 5/16" circle end up exactly 3" apart along the curve. Except the last one.

[srwtlc]

4914

[beacon14]

Like I said, it might not matter. The smaller the heart, and the tighter the curve the bigger the discrepancy would be.
If the easy way works, I'm all for it.