Wow, this forum is intimidating for a new user, and I’m quite certain that I’m going to sound like an idiot, but here goes:
Bought the Longer B1, 400x400 work area. Downloaded, installed and started the 30 day Lightburn triaI.
Got a fancy file from Etsy, imported the .svg for 1/8" ply. It doesn’t fit the work area graph (by just barely), so I grabbed the little corner handle and scaled it down a little bit (the corner grab kept the aspect of x and y locked).
But since the original design was built for 1/8" plywood, it stands to reason that if I reduce it down (call it 10%) to fit on on one sheet on my work area without also physically reducing the thickness of the material through one of my actual shop tools, the joints/tabs will get tight and such, right?
I’m having a little bit of trouble wrapping my head around altering digital dimensions and how that affects the physical world. Am I on the right track with thinking that just cramming the whole design down into a workspace also requires a material thickness change as well?
I’m leaning towards thinking that the real solution would be to use two pieces of stock, and selecting/dragging/copying the original sized stuff around so that I end up with like…two “files” at the original scale, each having roughly half of the pieces. Is that right?
Thanks for the patience. It won’t take me long to get it sorted out, but I bet I’m going to come up with some epic-level dumb questions before I’m not building a bunch of weird pieces that don’t fit each other or anything else.
Welcome to the forum.
You have the option in Lightburn for up and downscaling your drawings/topics and you can customize e.g. finger joints for different material thicknesses.
Depending on how well known you are with Lightburn, it is relatively easy or difficult to achieve the target. I would recommend making a small simple box in “Boxes.py” 50x50mm in 3mm material and then try to customize it for example. 4mm material. Here in the Forum you will find many of the necessary information, next to the well -written Lightburn documentation.
PS. You can enter your question into the search box here in the forum and see if there are others with similar questions and solutions.
Your intuition is dead on. Scaling the design will affect fitment based on material.
You have two basic strategies:
As you’ve stated, instead of scaling the design, you break-down the design into discrete parts that preserve material thickness.
You scale the design and adjust the portions of the design that accommodate material thickness
How you approach this depends on various factors including the design itself (e.g. complexity, applicability), your goals, the material, etc. @bernd.dk touches on approach for this in his reply.
LightBurn has a specific tool for resizing tabs and slots. It works under ideal scenarios but may not properly detect slots in poorly made designs or very complex scenarios.
