Corel Question and flower pot cdr

[James Jaragosky]

Someone posted a cdr file for plans to a puzzle rocker in the cnc forum.
I cut one out of .75 mdf and it turned out just fine. Using .75 mdf was a fair amount of overkill to say the least the chair must weigh 20-30 lbs. I decided to scale down the material thickness so I could use .25 cdx and make the chair into a yard prop for a potted plant holder.
Now you have the background; here comes my corel draw questions.

What is the usual process to reduce tabs and slots in drawings using corel draw?(my method is laughable)
How do you get exact measurements using Coreldraw?
I believe that I have reduced the slots to .25 but I was unable to find a accurate way to track measurement using Coreldraw.
below is a link to the OP of the chair drawing.
link http://sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=108490
Here is my reduced material sizing of the original drawing.
I am going to scale it down and cut it out of .25 material on the laser later this weekend.
maybe a acrylic desktop plant holder, who knows.


[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/HP_ADM%7E1/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-3.jpg[/IMG]

[Dennis Brooker]

Jim - I downloded the file - One way, but not the only way, would be to make a rectangle .25" x 1" (the length doesn't matter) and line it up to one of the slots and scale up the whole design until one slot matched the .25" wide rectangle - Does this answer your question or am I missing the question? I will say in CDR that any part is measured in width and height and you easily change those numbers in proportion or independently - Dennis Brooker

[James Jaragosky]

Jim - I downloded the file - One way, but not the only way, would be to make a rectangle .25" x 1" (the length doesn't matter) and line it up to one of the slots and scale up the whole design until one slot matched the .25" wide rectangle - Does this answer your question or am I missing the question? I will say in CDR that any part is measured in width and height and you easily change those numbers in proportion or independently - Dennis Brooker

Dennis thanks for the quick reply.
I wanted the overall size of the project to remain unaffected; I just wanted the the points (slots) that dictate material thickness to be reduced.
I used a variation of the method that you described, but I had to do it in aspire. basically what I did was create a .25 rectangle with radius ends; I then centered the rectangle in each slot,cut the vector I needed to reduce. I then stretched the cut vector equally from each side until it touched my new rectangle. then deleted the exccess and joined the ends.
it took a little time to do them all.

[Scott M Smith]

I saw somewhere on the Epilog website with one of their samples about resizing a puzzle. I will see if I can find it.

[James Jaragosky]

Both chairs here have been reduced from the original file posted in the cnc forum.
Both chairs shown below are made out of .1875 material. The red chair is the one that I reduced the slots first then re sized the whole thing.
The yellow chair, I just reduced the whole file.
As you can see by reducing the slots I have more control over the overall size.

[Bruce Larson]

When we have a pattern with slots, we size the pattern to whatever we require, then we draw a rectangle with the exact thickness of the slot we want. We then copy and rotate the slots as needed to fit over the pattern. Finally by using the shape tool, it is fairly easy to drag the vectors of the original pattern to fit the exact sized rectangles. The kerf from the laser then usually results in a good tight fit.