Scaling a free design to work with draftboard

justinbigby · December 11, 2020, 11:42pm

Hello to all!
On a maker binge for family for Christmas, and my sis-in-law loves those 3d animal head (cardboard) wall mounts.
So I found a free design, and thought I would try it out (see attached). It is a moose head.
I used Draftboard to cut the design, but the snap together slots are too narrow for assembly. I assume this design was specifically for cardboard (thin material).
Is there a shortcut or trick to scaling these designs to work with 1/8" plywood? The slots are about 1/2 that size, and I have no desire to try and manually resize every one of them.

Moose Pg1 Moose pg2

cynd11 · December 12, 2020, 12:27pm

I know of no shortcut to resizing the slots on this design. It wouldn’t take all that long to do manually though. What I would do is:

Measure the material thickness you plan to use. Figure out the difference between that and the existing slot widths. Adjust for kerf if you care to do that.
You can either divide that distance in two and move each slot side out that distance, or just apply the full change to one side of each slot (that’s probably what I would do cause I’m lazy).
In Illustrator, using the direct selection tool, shift select the vertical side of each slot you want to move to the left, then use the Transform…Move edit menu command to move them all at once. Repeat if needed on the opposite slot side except move them to the right.

I hope this makes sense.

justinbigby · December 12, 2020, 2:44pm

Thanks for the tips!

ca_worth · December 12, 2020, 2:45pm

you might be able to edit the svg directly. likely a pain in the butt though.

justinbigby · December 12, 2020, 2:53pm

Yea, spent 30 minutes widening 2 of the 200 slots to fit, so not worth it to me.

evansd2 · December 12, 2020, 2:58pm

There is a way to scale it but it scales the entire thing. If you’re down with a larger overall model (it may be that it was always intended to be larger than what you’re seeing) this is how it’s done:

It’s a lot of words but it’s very much worth your time to learn this concept. Scaling precisely is a fundamental laser skill.