Quickheads

As some of you may know (if you've been following along for a while) I bought a copy of QCAD Professional so that I could do some design work and hopefully one day create a very accurate set of CAD files, for all of the templates, and all of the Quickie designs.

I have original paper versions of the templates that I turned into PDF files for the Quickie, Q2, Q-200, and Q1 with LS1 Canard.  The problem I was having, was getting the digital scans of the templates into a CAD program in a format that I could be fairly confident was properly proportioned.

I ran across a PDF to DXF conversion program on the web, which sounded like it would be absolutely perfect for what I needed.  (I mean, I already had the PDF's.)  Well, the program worked well, but it interprets thicker lines (on the PDF), as thousands of DXF entities, which of course need to be cleaned up.  The thousands of entities need to be retraced by hand to create a single spline from all of that mess.

On top of that, the scaling of the converted file was WAY OFF.  When I imported the 35x59" PDF file above, the resulting file was approximately 6x10".  Since the proportions were right, I decided to trace all of the templates at the reduced scale to save file space, and then figure out exactly how much to scale it when I was finished.

Well, I am very pleased with the final results.  After I spent the better part of four days tracing all of the templates on this sheet, I deleted the underlying PDF file and then figured out the scaling.  When I was all finished, I printed out the result and compared the the print to the original paper template sheet, to discover that it was an exact match!

So I think I'm on to something here! 

So it looks like I have my work cut out for me as far as converting the rest of the template sheets.  However I have no plans to make these files available in the store once I am finished.  I was thinking that perhaps I could use the CAD files to create hot wire paths, and plywood templates that could be used to more accurately generate jigging templates and bulkheads with a router.

Of course, I invite your feedback about all of this either in the comments window below, or in the forums.  I'll keep chugging away and decided what to do with everything once I hear from the community.

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