I am in the process of preparing to shape my first board: I have the blank (8’4 Burford) and the glass (6oz Volan) and the outline I want (Maurice Cole Red Dingo).
I have made the outline on AKU shaper that I am happy with by importing an image of the Red Dingo and then playing around with the outline.
I have spent some time trying to best print the outline to a pdf, so that I can then go to a printing shop to print if out before then tracing the image onto a 3mm sheet of wood that I bought.
Is there an easy/ier way to print the outline to pdf so that I can do this task.
I have played around with changing the format from letter to A4 to A0 to tabloid (whatever that is) and then portrait and landscape for each one.
Tabloid is a paper size sort of like A3.
Are you hoping to get it all printed all on one piece of roll-fed paper?
Are you working from a one-page print and summary PDF?
What software(s) are you comfortable with as far as graphics and CAD?
The logically idea is to print on 1 or as few pieces of paper. Yes, 1 - a roll of paper.
I can get my head around CAD software. Free versions that is. I have an engineering degree piece of paper locked away somewhere.
I haven’t used any software for sometime, except AKU Shaper. But the free CAD programs I should pick up the basics with the various help tools available.
Ps. I downloaded and played around with BoardCAD and QCAD that you advised me on in a different post (low rocker board) … a local shaper in the Surf Coast of Victoria sold me a great Burford blank at wholesale price.
If you have the *.brd file from Aku, you can read it into BoardCAD and printing an outline template is a standard option under the File>Print> drop down menu with an option to correct length for over the curve or plot as a spin template (less paper and template material). If the Aku file is not available, it’s probably worth the time to redo it in BoardCAD and have all the plotting and data export features of BoardCAD at your disposal.
To do something similar in QCAD (or most any 2D CAD), I load the image, draw reference lines at 1:1 for board length and width, and scale and move the image to match the reference lines. I would then draw an outline in CAD to match the outline in the image. Once this is good I move or hide the picture so I just have lines in CAD. Then I draw a grid that represents the printable area per paper sheet ( 8.5 x 11" paper is a 7.5 x 10" grid) and ‘tile’ the grid over the board. Then I make a 1:1 plot of each tile, cut out, and tape together using the sliding glass patio door as a light table. It’s a little fiddly but it works with my printer at home and is pleasant weekend work with a cup of coffee (substitute beverage of choice if you like) when it is way below freezing outside ( 20°F or -7°C here right now heading into the cold season.)
These are not the only options. Inkscape can do some neat things as far as large size documents and data conversion. If you are familiar with Adobe products there may be solutions there as well. If you have access to a large plotter, you would need to configure your PDF page size to suit or find the person at that shop who is a whiz at getting big things to print.
There are also more manual ways like using a scaled grid and ‘lofting’ the curves using measurements and lining along a wooden batten bent through the drawn/measured points as is done for boat building, etc.
Hi JRandy
Thank you very much for this post.
The first paragraph is the solution I will use.
By importing the .brd file to BoardCAD I just printed the image, over the curve, to a PDF and I now have the 8 foot board outine in 3 pdf’s (really just 2 and 1/4) in size A0. I will be able to easily find a print shop to print A0 size paper so that is alot better than 10 or 15 A4 pages.
