Hi everyone,
Sorry if this has been talked about before, but there seems to be so much info and I'm not really sure what applies to me. I use my shopbot mainly for speaker cabinets. To date, I do all my programming in a text file. Just moving in straight lines, the basic CR, CC, CA, etc do just about everything I need.
Now I am getting into a few cabinets that will have many multiple rings or shapes cutout and stacked to form the cabinet. The basic shape will be similar to a letter D. I need a way to create this shape and then resize it to many different sizes. When stacked these pieces will make somewhat of an egg shape.
I also have many requests for things like reindeer , snowmen, and things like that around the holiday season. I would like to be able to scan in the plans you can buy at the woodworking stores, or take some .gif images of santa and then have a way to cut these. I just need to make a path for cutting the entire shape. Then I figure I can just use a standard spiral upcut bit and do passes at 2 or 3 depths to cut it all out. Basically the same that I do now.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of money to spend on something that can do this. Does anyone have suggestions for a low cost method to go from at 2D gif file to a 2d cutting file?
John