Adjusting premium patterns

When a Premium member “purchases” a pattern, it immediately goes to the dashboard. How can you adjust the pattern for kerf? I am working on one now where the fit isn’t as tight as it should be and I have no way to fix that… Help…

Hmm, didn’t you just ask this about scaling? If not, I’ll dig up that thread, but I swear we just talked about this.

Probably this, but you can’t edit design library files, you can only scale them.

Hmm nope, this was more recent.

Turns out it was a different person :slight_smile:

This should be enough for most things. You can scale very accurately using the precision rulers.

So… not sure I got an answer here, but what I think I hear [read] you saying is that there is no way to adjust the kerf on a premium or catalog purchase to make slots and tabs fit more snugly. Yes?

Not exactly.

This you can do, but only via scaling.

So the trick would be to know how big the slots are now, how big they need to be, and then scaling the overall size of the project to hit that desired slot dimension. It’s not very straightforward at first glance, especially getting the exact slot dimensions, but it should be possible to use math to scale things very accurately. The method is outlined for inkscape, but since the glowforge precision position interface also supports using math the process would be the same more or less.

Ugh… math… but, I use Illustrator, not Inkscape.

Regardless, it seems to me that if you’ve “purchased” a file, you should have the ability to modify it to fit the materials you’re using, just like any other file you purchase.

As for illustrator vs inkscape, I’m sure illustrator does the same things.

This sounds like a case to be made for exporting the designs you buy. Email support about your feature request!

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I’d like to see that as well.

In the meantime, Illustrator can be your friend in the math department. First, you can scale just by typing in the 91.23% (this is an example, not your actual solution…I’d guess your kerf correction would be closer to 99.3% or 100.6% depending on which way you need to go.). Or, 2/3*2.05 as a size (another example). Play around with a non-critical file in Illustrator, make some kerf samples and see what happens.

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In this case you didn’t purchase the file, you purchased the right to cut the design as presented. Unfortunate, but it’s what the system is.

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I have used the process I found on Inventables that helped with resizing for different material thickness. I did test out a small cut of two pieces to test before running my project. Worked great!

Resize Projects of Laser Cut for Different Material Thickness

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Thanks for the link!

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