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But what about complex shapes such as the top? Unless a procedure is provided to construct the shape with primitive shapes, one has to rely on the drawing. And, I hear all the time how folks paste a cutout of the top (from the drawing) onto a board for cutting. Now, if there is a scale problem in one direction, then the cutout shape will be wrong. Is this not true? BTW, I and excited that Lance & Brock are making templates available for the OLF plans. Please, excuse my obvious ignorance here, but based on all of these posts, it is clear I am missing something here. If there is a technique for transfering the outline of the top to the board that does not involve using the drawing directly, please tell me about it. And, please be kind here, I am asking a serious question.

Mike

I tell you what, and I mean this in good faith and good humor. You will not find a guitar plan set that gives dimensions for the top shape or find one that was Xerox large format printed that is 100% to scale prints (notice I said prints. I have no doubt most if not all of the hand and cad original drawings are 100% to the design scale) It is in the printing that the error accrues.

Yes there was a major printing error caused by a bad PDF files on one batch of the OLF plans that was rectified months ago. I am not involved anymore but if you have a set that has been printed properly off the last set of PDFs sent to the printer. They should be good barring any printers errors. That said tracing the top profile to make a mold is normally fine. The amount of print error should be insignificant for the purposes you want to use the profile for if the printer did his job right.

Most of the comments about measuring geometry of a print set is good info. And I took great pains to give every dimension reasonable for a guitar plans set. The top profile is never detailed dimensioned be cause to do so would require many arc centers connected with many tangent lines and would end up blocking out the whole of the top.

Now realistically you can take the over all length, upper bout spread, waist valley spread, waist radii, and upper bout spread and plot out your own profile that will be so very close it is not funny and all those dimensions are on the face of the drawings. Your radii may not be the exact same as mine but they would end up pretty darn close to make those dimensions fit with each other.

I remember you saying that about the bad printing quite a while ago. I took your advice and waited several months before ordering the plans. I would have no idea how to know if the plans I purchased came from the bad or good PDF. Maybe there is a rev # that would tell me.

As for transfering the top to the mold, I and good with all that you said.

Thanks,

Mike

We did not do revision to the drawing. The drawing was always correct it was the print file that was currupted not the drawing file. The printers do not print directly from the Autocad file because printers do not have AutoCad or any program that reads dwg files (That is a shame because Autodesk offers a free program that will print to any network printer and to true scale barring calibration errors in the printer). We had to created PDF files of each page and they printed form the PDF files. It was the PDF file that got currupted in some form or other so this would not invoke a revesion level to the drawing. Now I know the last PDFs sent to the printer two months ago were good. i do not know if the output the printer has done since is or not as i am not involved.

Thanks Mike!

Hope you plan on hanging around.

Mike

i will be in from time to time when not traveling or in between flights when i can find wifi