First Carving Off New Machine

[advadv]

Here's my first project off a machine I picked up Saturday morning. 20 minutes of design, one-hour, fifty-minutes to carve, and a couple of hours to paint. The design needs some work (too much outline around the smaller type), but an awesome machine. Just hopes it keeps working....

Please critique. Thanks.

Joe

[rjp736]

Looks sweet !

[Bill]

Hello Joe,
Looks Great ;) Your off to a very nice start.

[BoardSilly]

You did a good job for your first one off.

[MarkJamesDesign]

Nice one ad. Did you lay that out in designer or was it imported from another application?

[advadv]

I did the layout in Designer. I then made a pdf file of the board, and imported that into Illustrator to match the type in order to cut the vinyl and gold leaf. An export eps would be very handy, as it was rather tricky to match the curve of the type. But, I found Designer really intuitive, and actually did the layout in less than twenty minutes. Still have a lot to learn, but I am very excited about the possibilities.

[Skyhawk]

Wow, that looks a lot better than th efirst project out of my machine! (maybe I have a bad machine??? It can't be me!)

[DocWheeler]

I did the layout in Designer. I then made a pdf file of the board, and imported that into Illustrator to match the type in order to cut the vinyl and gold leaf. An export eps would be very handy, as it was rather tricky to match the curve of the type.

Mainly about the vinyl and gold leaf. I thought that "leaf" was applied rather than carved - I can visualize carving vinyl - but why the need to inport to Illustrator!

Ken

[MarkJamesDesign]

Joe,
What is the material you carved this sign from?

[Greybeard]

I then made a pdf file of the board, .....

For me this is a key sentence. Could you expand this please to say how ?

I'm not sure if you mean you created the file from your original idea before going into designer, or if you can create the pdf from the designer file, or a "printscreen" copy.

Regards
John

[BoardSilly]

File -> Print -> Adobe PDF

You have to have full version of Adobe, or another PDF creator, installed to use it as a printer. Now, if we could just turn off those crosshairs.

[pkunk]

File -> Print -> Adobe PDF

You have to have full version of Adobe, or another PDF creator, installed to use it as a printer. Now, if we could just turn off those crosshairs.
Unless you have a Mac, in which case it's part of the finder/print options.:p

[Ted Grinnell]

Just go to View and Click on Construction Lines to turn off crosshairs.

[JOHNB]

Good Tip Ted- Thanks I Didn't Know That

[advadv]

Thanks for the nice comments. I used a piece of Signfoam 3/4". To make the PDF, I do us Macs, and created the PDF in the print menu. As for the vinyl and gold leaf, we have a plotter that cuts vinyl, like what you would use to letter a vehicle. I actually did the entire design in Designer, then did the export. I have not yet played much with importing, but it seems that you can only import bitmap files (jpg, bmp, tiff) and not postscript (eps). I may be wrong. I need to play more with the software, but was very impressed at how fast it allowed someone with no experience in it to create something that actually carved. I think with some practice, this will be come a central design tool in my shop.

I hope this answered the questions. Thanks for the encouraging feedback. It's great to have community to share ideas and tips with.

Joe

[BoardSilly]

Just go to View and Click on Construction Lines to turn off crosshairs.

Thanks Ted! All this time and I never even noticed it.