just what the title says, and if there's a place that accepts just .jpg's for simpler jobs that would be great. or else, if someone can make me a CAD file out of the goodness of their heart that would be terrific, because i dont understand how the programs to create such things work. here are my plans:
HI Ky9, i had 5 minutes to spare over dinner, so i drew it out for you you can find it over here : click you will find two files : a dwg and a dxf. Both are the same, but some compagnies will ask for a dwg and others will ask for a dxf enjoy Joungne
not bad joungne I looked over the file and even though I do a lot of this for my job I would be strechted to make that in 5 mins. What program did you use? what ever it is it doesn't treat arcs as true circles so the corners are 4 sided (like part of an octagon) and if the guys literally cut that, you would be able to tell. as far as cheap cutting I would pop open the phone book and call up the metal shopsin the area, some are happy to do one off's and custom work, some only want to do big production runs or will charge larger setup and programming fees. Also if it is steel or AL it could be cut no problem on a laser as well so keep that in mind. The cheapest price your going to see for cutting is around $35/hr (not including material) and generally the price is in the $45-60/hr range. I'm not going to guess how long that takes to cut but I would guess my shop would charge about $45 or so to jig up and cut. That's a wild guesstimate though and so many things can change the price.
software i use for the machine we have here also does arcs as a series of straights. and coreldraw and illustrator can export as .dwg .dxf and both would make that job in less than 5 mins. and when you import either into the program that actually controls the machine, perfect vector curves are turned into a series of straight lines.
alright, dcwaterjet.com says 75 dollars. thats way outta my range, so if anyone knows a cheaper place that would be great.
what machines are you running? the heavy duty plasma cutter we have here at my school treats circles as true vectors. I believe on the machine control level knowing it's starting and stoping point and arc radius, the numerical controller adjusts the travel speed in the x and Y axis' to make very clean circles. The newer abrassive waterjets have much more advanced cutting models and will adjust for the blowout thru radiuses as well as dynamic feed and travel rates that are calculated about 2000x per inch. at any rate every word address based CNC machine I've seen treats vectors as true circles on the math level. $75 seems about normal for a one off job like that, sorry I can't be more help but the best bet is just looking through the yellow pages for metal and welding shops and look for people with laser cutters aswell.
ive decided i dont like arial as a font for this whatsoever. does anyone have any suggestions for a nice, artistic-like text that will still treat the []* as characters and not ?
have a look at www.dafont.com they have tonnes of fonts and a preview of all the chars each font can do
