JOE_M

Wish it was October, that's the month I'm stuck visiting family in MI every year and there's never anything going on in October.

I'll try and explain what I know but it's hard without images and to be honest I'm too lazy to make a real tutorial. I open inkscape, open an image. First thing I do before playing with the image is to drag the image off to one side (click with the left mouse button, hold the button and drag). Then I go up top and click Path - trace bitmap and get that dialog box. Put the checkbox in "live preview". I don't check "remove background" or "siox foreground selection". I usually go straight to Edge Detection, and use the default threshold, but you can adjust it up/down and watch the preview to see what happens. If nothing is showing up in the preview, then you don't have your picture selected. Left click on the pic and you should see 8 double-arrows around the perimeter of it. No arrows means you haven't selected it. When it's selected and the preview is what you want, hit OK. If it's a very complex trace it might take a few seconds, but usually it's instantaneous. If the OK button is still lit, that means the trace is done - you just can't see it yet. Take the mouse back to your image, left-click-hold and drag to the center. 99% of the time the trace will drag to the center, and the image will remain off to the side. Every now and then it will be the other way around, I don't know why. The arrows will still be around the trace - it's still selected. Left click on the image, you'll get the arrows around it to show you've selected it, hit the delete button and the original image is gone and you'll just be left with the trace. At this point I usually save the trace as a SVG file (a type of vector file) and edit them in my V-Carve software. If you want to edit them in Inkscape you have to double-click on the vector and all the individual points will pop up. Hope that helps a bit, or that someone else can explain it more clearly. Also - if you've got a very busy picture, you can try another free software called Irfanview. It has some easy to use color manipulation and you can pick the background out color by color and make it white - cleaning it up so when you take it to inkscape it's a lot easier to do traces.

Have you tried using the automatic traces that are built-in to inkscape? You get 3 options and each has adjustments you can make and a preview pane. Path - Trace Bitmap

He had a Santa sign on his website that uses some of the same vectors. I used that and part of the pdf you posted to do this rough trace. I hope it's kosher - he does some great stuff and I don't want to steal any of his designs. I do have it saved as a dxf if you want any changes - I think the christmas tree part on top is a bit too pointy. And if you do use it you'll need to adjust the outline for the cutout on the box (just print another copy of this but slightly bigger).

Are you saying that you want that pattern, but need to change the 2013 to 2017?

I guess it's a glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing. I see it as spent $1700, got two bum saws and now waiting on a lower arm that he has to install himself. Blame it on shipping, blame it on whatever - doesn't matter to me. I don't care if it comes on a slow-boat from China, or personally delivered by the owner of the little made-in-USA ma & pa operation - if I spent $1700 on a saw, I don't expect to get two lemons. A little more effort put into the building and shipping would be a lot less time that Nilus has to spend on the phone dealing with unhappy customers. I'm sure there are those who disagree and think that this company is still God's Gift to Scrollsawing because they're such a small operation doing this for the love of it or whatever, and hey - that's great, to each his own. I do hope Iggy ends up - soon - with a saw that works the way he wants/deserves.

The padauk is orange-red now, but in time it will be a dark brown-red. The finish you put on it will darken it too.

If you knew the font, size etc. it would be easier but here's a quick try.

No, they're made by the same manufacturer (factory). It's a different company (front end) telling them what to build and what is acceptable. I had a 1988 Mustang. Made by the same company that put out the '71 Boss 351. 1971 Ford would have been ashamed to put their name on 1988's mustang.

Cherry is nice - smells like Swisher Sweets without the cancer. Most of the rosewoods smell like a well-perfumed old lady. Walnut has a nice smell but it's no cherry. On the other side, I've cut some nasty smelling exotics. One light-colored wood, maybe guatambu, not yellowheart or satinwood, made the shop smell like cat urine until I'd vacuumed up all the sawdust. And I got some dark wood from woodworker's source (fake walnut?) that came from latin/south America and it smelled like gasoline when I cut it.

If you find that too much, my Dewalt came very agressive but I did some tweaking to calm it down. You can look at your bottom clamp and see if something like this is possible.

https://www.sipuk.co.uk/scroll-saw.html He's on the other side of the pond.

When I ran my own web store I used Zen Cart - a free open source eCommerce software suite. There's also Magento and a half dozen more. They're all customizable - pick your layout, design pages, background images, product presentation, keywords, payment processors etc. They all also include shipping modules from all the major carriers like UPS, USPS and FEDEX. I could choose flat-rate shipping, or weight-based shipping. If I chose weight-based then I had a place to input the weight of each item, and a setting for tare weight (for the box and styrofoam padding), my ship-from zipcode and a box for the customer to put in their zip-code to calculate postage. For each item I could choose if I would ship it priority, express, 1st class, book-rate etc. I could put multiple options and let the customer decide how fast they wanted it. I could also link that to Paypal or Stamps.com and print out postage through them. I was linking directly to the USPS website until they stopped giving online discounts. It meant weighing each item before listing, but it gave accurate results for the USPS. The UPS I never trusted because they kept playing games with gas surcharges or their definition of oversized. And if you go with USPS you can buy the postage online and the carrier can pick up the package at your house (Provided you're in the city where they deliver to your location. If you're rural and far enough from your mailbox that they make you pick up packages at the post office, they won't come out to your house to pick up.)

When I ran my own web store I used Zen Cart - a free open source eCommerce software suite. There's also Magento and a half dozen more. They're all customizable - pick your layout, design pages, background images, product presentation, keywords, payment processors etc. They all also include shipping modules from all the major carriers like UPS, USPS and FEDEX. I could choose flat-rate shipping, or weight-based shipping. If I chose weight-based then I had a place to input the weight of each item, and a setting for tare weight (for the box and styrofoam padding), my ship-from zipcode and a box for the customer to put in their zip-code to calculate postage. For each item I could choose if I would ship it priority, express, 1st class, book-rate etc. I could put multiple options and let the customer decide how fast they wanted it. I could also link that to Paypal or Stamps.com and print out postage through them. I was linking directly to the USPS website until they stopped giving online discounts. It meant weighing each item before listing, but it gave accurate results for the USPS. The UPS I never trusted because they kept playing games with gas surcharges or their definition of oversized. And if you go with USPS you can buy the postage online and the carrier can pick up the package at your house (Provided you're in the city where they deliver to your location. If you're rural and far enough from your mailbox that they make you pick up packages at the post office, they won't come out to your house to pick up.)

I remember making one of those many years ago but with a couple of holes to hold ketchup and mustard bottles.

Hopefully she recovers quickly and the pain goes away. I don't sell on etsy. I used to buy there years ago but I found searching to be a pain and then they just opened the floodgates to all the mass produced stuff and I stopped visiting.

Yea..... You think it looks good but think about it. They've got you all the way across the street from the beer garden, and as far as you can get from the food court. You'll be watching all those people walk by with their fried-whatever-on-a-stick and a cold brewski while you're stuck drinking lukewarm soda once the ice in the cooler melts, and chowing down on whatever snacks the wife packs. And you know she's packing something "healthy" like sliced carrots and celery.

Couple of questions.... 1. Is that just a piece cut out from the board, and then the texture is something stuck behind it to show through the gap? 2. Is it copyrighted? If 1= yes and 2= no, then I have made a pattern from it that might - as in maybe, I'm not sure - work.

Thanks, The projects already cut out in pine so I guess food coloring is out as an option.

Please explain the food coloring finish. I've got a project that needs coloring and what I've been doing is just a big pain in the butt.

Meh. They're all closer in time to today than to the big-bang, so cosmically speaking I am still a youngster.

Here's an idea, you'd have to play with the font (or make the letters raised). The quote is pretty common.

I'm not a machinist but I've got all the tools (until Tuesday when someone comes for the lathe and surface grinder) and tapped quite a few holes (I also use a #7 for 1/4-20). If we go by real tolerances, an M6 major diameter is 5.974 max, 5.794 min. If I haven't messed up the math, that equates to .235" and a .188" hole, making a .203 even looser - and that's if you get the fattest M6 bolt sitting in the hardware drawer. That would make me agree with Mark1 that maybe this isn't the way you want to go. Perhaps you could verify that they're making a 13/64 hole, and not a #7 hole, and once you know for sure just try it yourself on a scrap piece of metal. You can buy either one of those drill bits for less than $4 at your local hardware store. Drill the hole, tap it with your M6x1 tap, and see if you're happy with the fit.

Does the software for your printer let you adjust size?

say what?