Search the Community

Here's a useful and simple to use piece of free software that will allow you to print any of your patterns to any size you choose. It's called BigPrint and only works for Windows computers but works under Wine if you are a Linux user. For example, you create/buy/download a pattern designed to fit on a piece of timber that's 150 mm (6") wide, but you have a neat piece of timber that is only 140 mm (5.5") wide. By inputting your measurements, you can scale the pattern to either enlarge or shrink to fit accordingly. Download from here. The site is safe and Matthias Wandel is a woodworking genius. There is a very easy to follow tutorial over here but if you get stuck, sing out - I use this a lot. The free version will print 'Evaluation' on the final print out but it's easily ignored during cutting. I actually bought the software because I liked using it so much, other than that I have no connection with the site or the software. My main use is for getting plans for a particular sized toy and scaling it up to match the timber I have on hand. Very useful for various sized rocking horses. As a quick example getting sizes from an image: I loaded an image in that had no measurements on so I 'told' BigPrint how big I wanted one of the sides. (Top image) Middle image shows what the image looks like now it has a dimension added. Having told BigPrint the side is 160 mm (6.25") long, I then got it to tell me how big the end piece would be and based on the size entered earlier, it told me the end piece is 117.6 mm (close enough to 4.5") (Bottom image). I know, now, if I have a piece of timber that I can use for this project. I'm still finding my way around this site, so my apologies if this seems to be the wrong place for this post. Doc from Australia