Scaling Project Plans: Simple Math for us Newbies

I scale the whole project at one time, either in illustrator or if it’s small scale enough for one piece of material I do it in the UI. Maybe I’ve just been super lucky but when I scale whole project everything works out perfect.

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So I was looking at the plans for this box, and was wondering what the bits on the left hand side are? You can see the walls, the top and bottom, the bit of art, and then there are these weird clippy hook things? What are they?

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The clip things attach to the lid (the bit in the top-left with the four circles). It looks like they press against the inside of the box to hold the lid in place so it doesn’t fall down the inside of the box.

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Correct. The lid has holes to allow the box’s use after the wine is gone as a cork storage box for a collection of corks.

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Interesting… I haven’t seen something like that before. It’s a bit of a strange design choice, why not just use tabs on top and have the lid slide down onto them? You’ve got to make holes either way.

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It’s a pretty interesting design though. It looks like the friction to hold the top in is from the curved fingers going down that spread out to engage the sides of the box. That way the lid is firmly affixed and there is a smaller chute that goes inside and slides up and down.

Avoiding the tabs for the top might have a two-fold purpose. No tabs around the top looks better with a smooth edge. All other tabs are glued. So having tabs and slots for the lid would have to be real precise or it wouldn’t hold. Then if it held it would be hard to remove.

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Yep, though with tabs all over the thing already having a few more on top to slide down on would be really trivial. Looks like there is about 3mm of difference to create friction and hold the top in place. Pretty fancy.

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Yeah bought it and then had to reinsert my IO so I lost it…those are soooooooo cool.

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How absolutely wonderful! (Unfortunately it gives away all our secrets. Now you must be destroyed.) :sunglasses:

Never seen Harry Enfield before…that is hilarious…subbed!

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LOL - omg, that completely explains my wild hair. I never should have gone to grad school.

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In Japan they call this buriko, which is where a woman will deliberately look less intelligent (i.e. ‘threatening’) than her man. I have seen women with Doctorates do it.

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I wouldn’t be shocked! Chuckle!

I skimmed the responses and didn’t see this. There is a setting in Inkscape that allows the stroke width of a line scale when you scale the object. (i.e. if your stroke was 1mm and you scaled by 1.25, then your new stroke would be 1.25mm.) This can affect the overall size of things. Find that setting and make sure it is turned off (I believe it is a global setting, so you only have to do this once, not for every file.)

That’s a cool wine box.

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excellent point -

I’m using Inkscape version .91, and there are buttons in the button bar for this. The first button should be “up” (aka: not clicked down, aka: turned “off”). The tooltip for it says, “When scaling objects, scale the stroke width by the same proportion”.

When scaling project plans as described here, we want the lines to stay 1 px (or whatever) and not to grow fatter or skinnier as we rescale the whole thing.

If you want to “try this at home”:

  • draw a simple rectangle
  • make sure that button is “off” (looks not-pressed down)
  • open the dialog for “edit stroke style”
  • resize your rectangle and notice that the stroke width does NOT change as your rectangle gets bigger/smaller

now see the difference with that button turned “on” (it looks pressed down)

  • click that button on
  • resize your rectangle
  • look at the stroke width as you resize the rectangle: the stroke width gets bigger as you make the rectangle bigger and smaller as you make it smaller
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Did you download the free sample file to fine-tune your scaling/kerf? Might be overkill, but I liked that they provide it before you purchase the pattern.

Btw, the lid design is featured at the beginning of

about 7 seconds in…

Can’t wait to see your version!

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I did! Though I abandoned it for a generic box maker, trying to decide if I want to rip off the original totally or redesign a new front. Currently tinkering with a fancy glass window effect… There are literally 1000 amazing looking laser cut wine boxes out there!

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I found a nice box generator online: http://www.makercase.com/

It might be worth mentioning that you can simplify the process a bit by inputting your dimensions as a formula.

Take your example:

I would do the following:

Ensure that the aspect ratio is locked (padlock icon is locked in dimension bar)
Control-a (select all)
Click at the end of the W or H (doesn’t matter which one since you locked aspect ratio) and add “*.136/.125”
Hit enter. All done!

it’s a very small “improvement”, but once you start thinking like this, you can take advantage of the fact that Inkscape accepts formulae almost everywhere. Want to make a pentagonal arrangement of objects, but forget how much to rotate each copy? Object->transform, select rotate, and for degrees put in “360/5”, voila.

OK, so maybe that was easy, 72 degrees is nice and even… but slightly more complicated: same situation but you’re making a 13-sided figure? Wait, what, you don’t have that memorized? No worries, “360/13”, boom. (it’s 27.692 degrees, of course. :wink: )

Want to move something to the left by 1/15th of an inch? Ensure your doc is in inches, select the object, click X position box, add “-(1/15)” to whatever is in there, hit enter.

It’s useful for all kinds of things, go forth and multiply!

(wait that came out wrong. oh well :slight_smile: )

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