Stan Kern and his recent activity on the forum as a new member!

[Neale]

Let me try to make a positive suggestion. We do see, not very often but sometimes, posts on the forum which in effect say, "Look at this and see how clever I am!" Great - I can skip over those as fast as the next man because I haven't learnt anything except that a clever person can do clever things. Now, there are some really interesting threads on the forum which show exactly how, step by step so that others can learn and follow in their footsteps, someone has achieved something. That's something we can learn from. Knowing how to get from a pencil drawing, say, to a toolpath that can cut those shapes on a CNC router might well be of interest. Personally, I've always done it with a scanner (up to A4) or, very occasionally, with a camera, on the grounds that $2500 a pop for a digitising tablet is a bit out of my budget. Or four of them end-to-end.

I'm playing with some 3D digitising software at the moment that takes a bunch of photographs and turns them into a 3D solid model. I might even write up something here if I can get to the point of getting reasonably repeatable results with comments on stuff I learnt on the way. How about doing something like that for the 2D digitising process? Especially if it doesn't start with "write a cheque for $2500!" I jest - but there must be something interesting going on in the process before you get the pretty output!

[Stan Kern]

not sure what you mean " but there must be something interesting going on in the process before you get the pretty output!" I print my project or have a print shop print it for me , then i trace it (digitize it) and load the file into vetric aspire 10.0 check the vectors and do some node editing if required and create a toolpath for cnc or no toolpath for the co2 laser and cut it
i also work with 3D i have a good printer 600mmx600mm and a 3D hand scanner , love all this tech stuff
but i use the drawing boards all the time , at least to start with
And I hope i don't come across blowing my horn , believe me i am not i am just posting some projects i do showing how easy it is
but this is not for everyone as its costly like the cnc and the co2 laser .
woodworking has gone high tech and costly

[Neale]

Now I really am confused! You have an electronic drawing in some format, you pay someone to print it full-size, then you manually digitise it with a high-quality (i.e. expensive) digitising board, then you import that into Aspire. I must have missed something here.

Quite coincidentally, earlier today my wife asked me if I could produce an outline drawing of some paper templates she was using but scaled up by a factor of 2. As it happened the largest fitted on to A4 so I scanned it to a bitmap which is possibly equivalent to your own starting point. Then I imported the bitmap straight into Vectric Vcarve (which I believe to be a cut-down version of Aspire so I would guess that Aspire can do anything Vcarve can do). It took at least 30 seconds to convert the bitmap to a vector outline although one of the pieces took a couple of minutes longer to node-edit the outline as the scan wasn't quite so clean. I now have a vector drawing which I am about to export into something that will let me print it at the size I want (as Vcarve isn't very clever when it comes to printing designs to a given size) as my wife wants to cut out larger paper patterns. However, I could equally well have generated a toolpath to take to the router to cut, say, plywood templates (and I have done this quite often in the past - my wife comes up with these little projects for me!).

But the idea of printing, manually digitising, and then going back to the Vectric software? That's why I thought that there must be something special about the digitising process. I'm certainly not blowing my own horn either - it's so simple and obvious that I just assumed that everyone did it that way and that I had missed something.

Doesn't take anything away from your finished products which look great. It's just that I can't understand why there is the manual stage in the middle!

[Stan Kern]

well all this hurt, its your site and you all have bullied me into quitting.
i will not be blowing my horn and showing off anymore and posting one subject
I thought members would enjoy seeing different techniques and get ideas of there own from what i attempt
but a few run this site , if i knew how to delete my posts I would
I am done, you won

[magicniner]

well all this hurt, its your site and you all have bullied me into quitting.

No one bullied anyone, you ignored the quite reasonable suggestions to keep it to one thread and continually Spammed the forum with multiple posts about exactly the same thing with only slight variation.
I read one of your posts with interest but when you added a further 10 about the same thing I had to go rooting around in the individual subject sections to find the other interesting things and genuine requests for help which your completely unnecessary and frankly incredibly selfish behaviour had knocked off the list of recent posts.

[Neale]

Sorry if I've caused offence, Stan. The point I was trying to make was that you are clearly doing things differently to the way that, for example, I do it. You've clearly spent time, effort and money developing the way you work but it's not clear from what you have said how you use it and what the advantages are. I've never played with a digitising tablet and all I know is what I read in the link posted earlier - which rather assumed that you knew what you were looking at already! For example, I've never used any software digitising/tracing software that is both easy to use and reliable - is doing it manually an improvement? How do you overcome distortion in the paper prints that you are tracing from? There's a bunch of interesting questions in there and showing just the output doesn't answer them! As an example of what I mean, I'm guessing that you see the regular emails from Vectric showing off a number of projects carried out using their software. However, if you follow up any of them, you usually get to a description of how the guy did what he did which is useful information that might be applied to other projects as well.

[JAZZCNC]

Stan, I don't think any of us have bullied you, Neale, is only questioning the process and why you do it how you do. Which I must admit I tend to agree with him in that it does seem a very expensive way to do something which can be done easier.

As for those of us, including me, who objected to your Multiple threads only do so because of the fact we understand how the forum is used by other users and how much the trending list is used as the first point of call for people viewing or those seeking help. Your posts were clogging the list up and possibly denying others seeking help from getting it when needed.
Only today I've helped people who needed advice ASAP who if you had posted 8 or 10 threads like you was doing would have got knocked off the list and possibly missed out getting the help needed.
This isn't bullying it's respectfully asking you to help others by changing how you post your information. Is it a form of running the forum, well yes I guess you could call it that, but we ask for the sake of others so they get help when needed. This is certainly not bullying IMO.

I'm sure many liked your posts, me included and I would really like it if you stayed, but not if you are unwilling to help others by simply changing how you post. Because as an English man, this is just not Cricket Old Sport.

Take care if not.!