Inputting existing drawings into Part Wizard

[peter.j.meacham@lmco.com]

Hi, what method(s) are available to us or are used by you to input existing paper drawings or plans into Part Wizard please. Can we use a flatbed scanner or a digitizer or ....? Any other methods? Thanks, Pete.

[jkforney]

Pete
ShopBot sells a Barcode Wand that is essentially a barcode reader on a drawer slide. It will take lines drawn on paper and output a dxf file (maybe a .sbp also). Chris Burns demoed the wand at the Ohio Camp ShopBot and it worked very well. I have heard from others that it hasn't worked as well for them. The key, at least at the Camp was good definition on the lines and the paper needed to be down tight on a flat surface. Chris taped white paper onto flat plastic and drew with a blue sharpie.

Folded drawings and lots of spots would probably be a different story.

Scanners can be more trouble than they are worth was the consensus at the Camp. I'm sure many people "use them all the time and have no problems" so I will leave the details to them. I find a scan valuable only to give me a start and I drop points and lines on top using a cad program.

The probe is great for edge tracing of existing templates. In fact I have transferred all my templates (a few after 32 years of woodworking) into the computer since Bill Young wrote the dxf tracing software for the probe.

I'm sure others have a better method or methods and will share them here.


John Forney

[grant@shopbottools.com]

While scanners can be a lot of hassle, I don't usually have too much trouble with them. If you have some drawings on 8.5x11" paper or something like that, I would look into an inexpensive scanner or borrow one from a buddy. There are a number of raster to vector translation programs on the market, many of which you can try out for free that will translate raster images into a .dxf or other format polyline drawing that can be imported into Part Wizard. You can find one of these programs at www.algolab.com, and it is called PhotoVector.