Tired of clicking all these nodes

[TJS]

Ok,
So I have been working on this sign for a long time. I am about to throw in the towel. I got the tow truck from here. Tom has been the best at helping me. I tried with the pen tool and the pen tool stopped and raised on every node. I then went and tried cleaning it up some more. There were broken lines on the right rear tire. Now I cannot for the life of me create an arc and path it and then attach it to the tire. I have been clicking for a long long time with on many lines to combine the nodes. It might be my laptop running low on ram, because I used to be able to select a line and do a combine when the nodes highlighted. Now I have to ctr shift click and then move up the line and then do a combine. It is taking for ever. Also the hydraulic cylinder on the boom is not straight. I cannot get it straight. Any help is greatly appreciated. I attached the svg.
Thanks.
T.J.

[TJS]

Here is the vid. I gave up on the lug nuts as they are all separate nodes too.

https://youtube.com/shorts/WvsGiWS8pnQ?feature=share

[adbuch]

I'm assuming you wish to cnc plasma cut this and you were using the pen for proof of concept. If so, are you after something like this?

David

Here is the svg from Inksape

towtruck final.svg

(220.24 KiB) Downloaded 79 times

or as dxf

towtruck final.dxf

(811.46 KiB) Downloaded 67 times

[adbuch]

Ok,
So I have been working on this sign for a long time. I am about to throw in the towel. I got the tow truck from here. Tom has been the best at helping me. I tried with the pen tool and the pen tool stopped and raised on every node. I then went and tried cleaning it up some more. There were broken lines on the right rear tire. Now I cannot for the life of me create an arc and path it and then attach it to the tire. I have been clicking for a long long time with on many lines to combine the nodes. It might be my laptop running low on ram, because I used to be able to select a line and do a combine when the nodes highlighted. Now I have to ctr shift click and then move up the line and then do a combine. It is taking for ever. Also the hydraulic cylinder on the boom is not straight. I cannot get it straight. Any help is greatly appreciated. I attached the svg.
Thanks.
T.J.

T.J. - ask any questions you have and I will try to help you.

David

[acourtjester]

TJ do you have an original picture or drawing of the Icon you are trying to create. Maybe doing a normal trace in Inkscape would be better then the drawing you have. There seems to be way to many nodes in what you are working with now. Every node is a line in the G-code.

[adbuch]

T.J. - As Tom has said, there are literally thousands of nodes and there are also many groups of objects stacked on top of each other. So sort of a mess to deal with your file as is. Perhaps you could provide your original files for the truck and circles with text.

I have show below how to do it from scratch working from a screen shot of your Inkscape file in outline mode. So I manually traced the truck, then created the concentric circles similar in size to yours. The next step for me would be to manually trace the script text, or if I new the actual font it would make it much easier. Then I would combine everything together to achieve the result you are after.

I assume you want to learn how to do this yourself. So in that case maybe provide your original files or artwork that you started with and we can proceed to show the steps to complete the project.

David

screen shot original file.jpg (55.07 KiB) Viewed 3307 times

[TJS]

Thanks for all the help:
Answers to questions from the above posts:
Yes I will be CNC plasma cutting this out of 14ga.
I did draw the circles and the letters myself in inkscape with the specific font.
I used stroke to curve path or whatever it was to get the letters in the arc. Not a great feature because if you have another set of text it does not work right.
I downloaded the tow truck from plasma spider. I think that was my downfall. Full of broken lines and tons of nodes. Here is the link for it.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6007&p=29374&hilit=tow+truck#p29374

Here are a couple of questions as I only have done a couple of signs and this one to me is the most complicated one which rates right up there with the Tiger one I did.
Questions:
1. Do I use NO Offset for the tow truck, and should I adjust my starting points in order to hide the start point arc start(larger kerf dot so to speak).
2. I know I have more questions, more to come.

I really appreciate all the help on this David and Tom. If it were not for Tom's (acourtjester) pen tool I would be wasting tons of material.
Thanks again.
T.J.

[adbuch]

Maybe this will help. I edited the tow truck to isolate the part you need.
David

TOW 2 edited.svg

(75.83 KiB) Downloaded 69 times

screen shot original file 1.jpg (68.62 KiB) Viewed 3293 times

[acourtjester]

The way I look at the offset and not offset section is a single line is no offset but it also can only start from one end. With thinner metal you can play with the pierce and cut heights to reduce the start dot size. It seems when you have a file from some software they have way to many nodes. I try to stay with Inkscape to keep the nodes count down. I use Brightness cutoff as it produces a single line which I reduce the width down to about 0.005" so it is cleaner in SheetCam. To combine items I open a few pages of Inkscape and copy and paste to a page where I combine things, or store as broken apart viewing.

last project.JPG (15.66 KiB) Viewed 3293 times

[adbuch]

I assume when you say offset you are referring to the lead-ins?
David

[acourtjester]

TJ I know you said the customer wanted a single layered sign, do they think it will be cheaper that way?? It would be so much simpler to design using layers for the different items on the sign and it would look far better. It would be more dramatic if it is to be a lighted sign too. Led lighting can be used between layers also. Here is a simple project I did for a church, with LED between the front and back. Two layers of the exact same shape with spacers between them for the LEDs

[acourtjester]

https://www.google.com/search?q=clipart ... izt4JxLFPM

[adbuch]

Thanks for all the help:

I downloaded the tow truck from plasma spider. I think that was my downfall. Full of broken lines and tons of nodes. Here is the link for it.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6007&p=29374&hilit=tow+truck#p29374

towtruck question.jpg (69.48 KiB) Viewed 3275 times

[adbuch]

T.J. - I have worked on this one to straighten out the sides of the jack, etc. At 32 inches wide it would cut fine. I would not hesitate to cut this one on my Plasmacam table from 14 ga. steel. Don't worry about the number of nodes. Dxf files will always have many more nodes than svg. You need all the nodes to keep your text smooth and accurate. Go ahead and use your pen to trace it out. If you are happy, then just go ahead and cut it.

David

Tow Truck 1976 final.dxf

(878.11 KiB) Downloaded 70 times

[TJS]

Success. Hot off the table. 14ga. No issues.
I want to thank everybody for all the help. Tom and David I really appreciate the help. This is what this forum community is all about. Thanks so much.
T.J.

[adbuch]

T.J. - this looks great!! Thanks for showing us your finished product. We are all happy to help.
David

[acourtjester]

Looks great I hope the customer is happy, you have spent a lot of time with this project. I'm sure you learned many things and also the reader of PS will also benefit from the screenshots and info posted by David.

[TJS]

The owner loved it. It was a gift from an employee. He was very surprised. Thanks for all the help everybody.

[acourtjester]

Thanks for the follow up TJS, great when you hear "You did that for Me"

[adbuch]

TJ - that finished painted version turned out great! Thanks for showing us the end product.

David

[cuttinparts]

Turned out great! Nice job, I am sure he was thrilled with it.