Help with converting file to cut ready DXF

Can anyone help with converting this to a DXF? If knew how to make the entire picture black instead of gray, trace to bitmap would work fine but the crown is making it hard.

I am trying to do this in inkscape.

Grab a copy of Gimp. You can then change it to pure b&w and Inkscape will do a trace. You’re going to need to do some node editing in Inkscape to handle that guy floating in the name though.

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I believe you can mess with the threshold levels in the bit map tracing options as well to achieve that.

Why not just trace the crown yourself? It’s pretty simple.

Okay I will download Gimp. Thanks for all the advice and help guys. James has been super helpful since day one for me. I have gotten really good at editing nodes… Just cant get it to trace to bitmap with those colors.

Converted this to dxf and started bridging… see if this helps.FordDynasty.dxf (1.1 MB)

There’s lots of folks with experience and better software tools on FIVERR who will transform your image file for reasonable prices ($5-30 depending on amount of work). If it’s something you’ll likely make again and possibly sell that seems like a good deal. Most advertise 1 day turnarounds.

I’ve been struggling for 2 days with FreeCAD, Inkscape and LibreCAD to turn a picture into a cuttable file with no good results. Today as I was searching for a How-To that actually worked, I stumbled across this video about using the Vectric line of software products.

I downloaded and installed the trial version of Cut2D Desktop and it was easy enough to use that I’m going to shell out the $149 for the unlocked version because it appears that it will do everything I need to do (along with SheetCam). I made more progress in two hours (without reading the manual) than I did in 2 days with freeware, and I have high hopes that the unlocked version will create a DXF file that SheetCAM doesn’t hurl when fed it.

Update: I bought the unlocked version and in little time I had a DXF to cut that SheetCam likes. I did discover that my SheetCam was malfunctioning and a reinstall fixed it.

There’s a very cool feature in Cut2D named Vector Validation that really came in handy. You select a particular feature in the program, run that tool and then Search and it identifies and highlights any vector issues in the feature, allowing you to go in manually and fix them, ultimately outputting a dxf file with no errors that could choke things down the road.

I like Cut2D Desktop a lot. It’s limited to 24x24 drawing size but that’s only slightly smaller than my table and I can break my cut into two drawings and index the material if I have to make something bigger.

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Hi, what’s your progress with Vectric2cut? I want to try it too. Thanks for the reply.

It’s done everything that I’ve needed it to do and it’s been easy to learn. I’m happy with my purchase of it.

Here’s a wall hanging medallion which I made for some old friends that I worked with on the Caddo War Canoes amusement ride at Six Flags Over Texas when we were much younger. I found an old picture from the canoe ride online, used Inkscape to trace it to vectors and then Cut2D to edit and clean up the conversion into this medallion. It maybe took me three hours because I was still learning to use the software but I can go much faster now because I’ve learned that things which I can see zoomed way in aren’t visible at cutting size so replacing a bunch of small vectors with one much larger vector approximation of them is a workable method for me.

The basic shapes that are included with Cut2D are more than adequate for any of my designs and the mirroring function is very handy for creating things that are symmetric because only a portion of the shape has to be created and then mirrored in the full design.

The new guy on the ride was known as Otis J Spoon because we started them off with soup spoons before they got to use a paddle. :relaxed:

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Yes. It looks nice. What do you use to transfer to Firecontrol? I am just learning. Thanks for your feedback. Dave Komma

A thumb drive. I do my design at my desk where it’s comfortable and then hand carry the files to my table.

Once you’ve made your drawing be sure to go over it once again looking for things like kerf overruns in small areas and things which will fall out when cut (like the center of O’s) without adding supporting tabs.