Reply To: All things Beaver Mill

[Peter_HParticipant @peter_h]

Many thanks all, I'll have a look at that software.

> So you can't do a straight tracing and automatically get good results,

> rather you have to translate the photo into sensible CAD dimensions

> So you can't do a straight tracing and automatically get good results,

> rather you have to translate the photo into >sensible CAD dimensions

Yes, I'm aware of that problem. I've looked at photgrammetry a bit over the years, and it can be done from a single unknown camera, but only if you have some markers at known coordinates. Otherwise, you need several photos from different angles and ideally a known calibrated camera.

In this case, the source images I'm referring to are the section diagrams in the Beaver parts manual. There are several good sectional drawings, and from my experience so far, they seem to be mostly to scale. But aside from dimensional info, which would be great, the section drawings could be vastly improved and made much easier to view and interpret. The only releiable source of dimensions we have is to measure parts as they are stripped. But there are other cluse, such as a bearing type being known from the parts list – you immediately know the bore and shaft dimensions, and they can be used as calibration points in a useful small program called "Screnn Calipers" from Iconico. They do more or less what they say, and can store several different calibrations, so you can read directly in mm or inches after calibrating against a known length object in the drawing. Obviously doesn't work well if perspective is involved.

BTW, I saw there is an open source program called FreeCAD – is that related to LibreCad?.

http://www.iconico.com.

PS – I keep checking "send me email notifications when someone replies.." but I'm not receiving them.