Chris Wilson Posted March 2, 2009 Share Posted March 2, 2009 As an aside to my imprinted concrete thread I am looking to copy the infill panels on our front gates, which, 22 years ago, were oxy acetylene cut from steel plate in a leaf pattern. The drawings for them are long gone, but the previous owner / builder of the house now has a CNC plasma cutter. Does anyone know how you might get a paper outline drawing transferred to a suitable CAD file for a plasma cutter? I don't want to impose on him too much, so would like to find out as much as possible for myself before mithering him This is way outside my sphere.... Ta! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Posted March 2, 2009 Share Posted March 2, 2009 You can get large format paper scanned, and then "vectorised or summat innit?" into a CAD format. I've got a little freebie prog here called WinTopo that turns image files into .dwg files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Animal Posted March 2, 2009 Share Posted March 2, 2009 If you can send me a sketch showing all the dimensions, etc. I can draw it up for you. I'd just need to know what format the finished file needs to be so it can be read by the CNC machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
extendor Posted March 2, 2009 Share Posted March 2, 2009 Another way is a good front-on photo with very little perspective. Put this into photoshop to square up etc and export as JPG. Then import JPG into any good CAD programme as a sketch image, trace over it, scale to the finished size and export DXF at 1:1 We have to do this (or very similar) with company logo's all the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Animal Posted March 2, 2009 Share Posted March 2, 2009 That would work, too. You can tell I come from an engineering background - I like dimensions. Scaling from photos/scans smacks of lazyness/innacuracy to me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
extendor Posted March 2, 2009 Share Posted March 2, 2009 That would work, too. You can tell I come from an engineering background - I like dimensions. Scaling from photos/scans smacks of lazyness/innacuracy to me. Agreed, but it should give him what he wants and spreads the load around more people so more able to get done as a favour. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted March 3, 2009 Author Share Posted March 3, 2009 Thanks for all the replies. I have found a local firm with an old "magic eye" profiler that can follow a line drawing in full scale on card and cut the same outline in steel plate using good old oxy / acetylene. I believe this is how it was done originally, so that should be fairly straightforward! Thanks again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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