Has anyone converted the plans to metric yet ,If you have can I take a look at them as I am new to autocad and have not got a clue how to do this,in fact all I can do is start autocad look at the screen - become bemused and go and make a cup of tea and scratch my head.

Its a daunting task so I am going to have a go at converting everything to metric - I will be taking my time on this - If anyone wants to help at least check my results please contact me.I dont want to do a load of hard work and give people dimensions only to find I got them wrong and they want to string me up because of wasted time and effort.

I may even have a go and attempt to learn autocad at the same time and produce dxf files - good grief I am not sure why I am even going to try this ah well.........guess I dont have a life anymore - well at least since I came across this forum and decided to make this machine

If you have time, you could take a "Graphics for Engineers" class. Here in the U.S. a lot of the small community colleges offer the class without any prior requirements. It's a freshman year class for engineering majors. My class covered AutoCAD in 2D.

From "help" in AutoCAD Mechanical Desktop.

To convert a drawing from inches to centimeters

From the Modify menu, choose Scale.
At the Select Objects prompt, enter all.
All objects in the drawing are selected for scaling.

Enter a base point of *0,0.
Scaling will be relative to the world coordinate system origin and the location of the drawing origin will remain at the WCS origin.

Enter a scale factor of 2.54 (there are 2.54 centimeters per inch).
All objects in the drawing are now 2.54 times larger, corresponding to the equivalent distance in centimeters.

Modify toolbar

Command line SCALE

Hi

I followed the instruction to scale the plans - in the main the dimensions got converted how it still left other dimensions not converted - I am guessing that they were manually put on the drawings.

:confused: :confused:

Mmmm. I saved the DXF files to DWG and created new layers for dimensions. I changed my dims to be fractional since my tape measures don't have decimals on them and i'm not a metalworker (those guys take prescision seriously :) ).

So basically i'm re-dimmensioning everything. Im sure ther is other ways of doing this, but i'm an amateur at this. :) Maybe some of the other guys can chime in.

An incomplete example:
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/641/cncassy05a1dr.png

Sorry, double post..:eek: