Tracing Carboard Patterns

[cncmitch]

I am cutting foam blocks to make seat cushons for the RV industry.

I have a bunch of old cardboard templants that I use as patterns for the cushions. I would like to be able to somehow trace those patters (they range from 1 foot to 5 foot, just think of any seat you would find in a motorhome).

On my smaller templants I just use my mouse and click on various parts of the cardbaord to make points then bring those into AutoCAD and try to make them into smooth curves, which I can't always do.

Any cheap solutions come to mind on how to "trace" those and convert them into smooth services?

Thanks.

[anoel]

A ruler is pretty cheap.... Mark a Datum point on the pattern and make all of your measurements from there. Mark points for your measurements in your CAD and draw Lines, arcs or curves through the points as appropriate. After beating through the first couple your should get the hang of it and the rest should go quickly.

[buscht]

What i do is get some paper that has 1" square marked off on it. Available at Staples. I then trace the template on the paper and use that to take my measurements like Nathan suggested.

I think that on the shopbot website,they talk about a way they have developed to use the CNC router as a 2D digitizer. That was a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure that was where I read about it.

[cncmitch]

Here is what I ended up doing:

1. Trace the cardboard templates on to large E size paper.
2. Go to Kinkos or some service outfit and the latest E size plotters all
have an option for a scanner. This will create a bitmap image.
3. Open the bitmap image in Autocad or similar load the bitmap image in as a layer.
4. In Autocad, create a spline and use the mouse to click bitmap image.
5. Turn off the bitmap layer and you are done!

I got that solution from the support site at www.mis-group.com

[joecnc2006]

yes i think the most acurate would be to digitize it, as mentioned above in previous post with the grid paper, use it to setup your x and y coords (northing and easting), and in autocadd you can input points per coordinates then just conect the points with line or curve which ever is aplicable.

[imserv]

Save yourself some time and just take a digital photo of the templates. Use a contrasting background and they will convert easily to vector contours with any of the raster to vector converters. You can precisely scale the images in your CAD program.

Fred Smith - IMService
http://www.cadcamcadcam.com