Has anyone have experience cutting RC airplane formers, ribs, partial plans, etc the use pdf or original plans?
There have been several discussions on that topic in the forum.
What specific challenge are you having with this?
Hi.
You don’t say 
.
IMO the skinny of it is that if the expectations are unrealistic, things go downhill in a blink of an eye.
EDIT: And if the expectations are realistic, the results are insanely gorgeous.
I don’t have personal experience yet, but I do plan to.
There’s a few things to consider.
First of all, to me LB is not a full blown commercial CAD/CAM software, nor is it intended or advertized as such.
LB can obviously be used as a CAD/CAM software -there’s great examples about that in the finished creations- but it’s not ideal.
Secondly, using PDF as a digital format to transfer design files can and will range from great to unusable, depending on how the file is made.
Basically, if You buy or otherwise aquire pdf plans that are intended to be used as a source to be converted into a cutting file, chances are that You’ll succeed with minimal grief.
OTOH, If You buy or otherwise aquire pdf plans that are intended to be used as glue and cut templates, or are just scanned copies of paper plans, chances are that You’ll stop cleaning 'em up after an hour or two.
And everything in between.
If I read Your thread title correctly, I assume that You wish to scale the pdf plans up or down?
I probably wouldn’t unless the party that provides the files agrees that it can be done easily.
Regards,
Sam
PDF files tend to import correctly into Lightburn. If the file was created to be A4 for instance it will import as an image that is 210mm X 297mm. Unfortunately, if they have been rescaled before you get them it can a right pain in the backside to rescale it correctly.
No I dont want to scale. My question wsa if they were copied to LB would they copy correctly or ‘need’ to be scaled. Poor wording on my part and supposedly many posts about this.
Admin can delete if so desired.
From what I have read, there is a problem with using the TRACE feature as lightburn sees the thickness of the drawn line as two lines, inside and outside the drawn line.
Copying a plan from a magazine or even from the paper plans included with the kit tends to be a lot of work.
You can try to use the sketch trace option, but the quality of the original image will ultimately determine the quality of the lightburn product.
Hi.
Ok, thanks for the clarification.
The very few I’ve tried have retained their original scale well.
The scale retaining is only a small -albeit important- portion of the overall conversion into a cnc file/program though.
Since hobby laser cutting and in some ways hobby cnc-routers as well are rather recent developements in model making, and pdf is more mature file format, this:
will throw a wrench in the cogs sooner or later.
The pdf plans I’ve came across tend to be A4 or A3 (or their US eqvivalents) “paper scale” for obvious reasons.
Since unless specified, there’s no way to tell in which part of the world -and by using which paper size system- the plans have been made/copied, the pdf may import to LB correctly, but the actual dimensions may not be what was expected.
In any case, while pdf does provide a flexible file format for document digitizing, -sharing and -printing, IMO it is not the best choice when it comes down to sharing engineering plans in file format.
Because of my background I for one prefer and almost exclusively use dxf, but there’s plenty of other options out there as well.
Absolutely nothing wrong with using pdf format if there is a need or a desire to do so, but it may take way more effort than one would think to produce a working cnc file using one.
Regards,
Sam
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