Trax, most laser kit cutters can cut from plans. However, most will tell you that they will cut what the plans show, and if the plans are off, that is what you will get.

The Cleavland plans are usually good. Some of the laser kitters may already have the plans in their system so they can tell you if it is a good project or not.

A well designed kit, done in CAD is going to be your best chance for success. There is an awsome amount of work that goes into designing a kit in CAD so that every thing fits and the parts all fit without problems. That is one end of the spectrum of what you can expect. The other end is a scanned set of plans that were not much more than a concept for a plane and you need to fit each part, or do redesign work to make the plans work. In this case, the kit cutters are going to give you a bunch of parts that need to be fit to work and you may need to do a lot of work to make the kit work.

If the plan set you have selected is one known to the kit cutters, they should be able to tell you if it is going to be a good plan to laser cut parts from. A lot of phone calls and Emails should take place before ordering your kit.

Post the model you are thinking of building, and someone will be able to tell you if it is a good canidate for a laser cut kit.

The PDF files means that the plans have been scanned into a computer format, or were designed in CAD and printed to a PDF (Portable Document File) format. This eliminates some of the work for the kit cutter. It gives a more precise set of instructions to the kit cutter, be they right or be they wrong. Just remember the old computer mantra, Garbage in = garbage out.

A kit cutter will scan the plans that you provide and do the best they can to turn the plans into cut wood. If the plans are very accuratly drawn, the chances of success are better. If the plans are ones that stack several views of parts into one drawing, using little indicators like triangles, squares, etc to represent the differnet outlines of the parts, then things can easilly go wrong as you are asking the kit cutter to make build desisions for you.

All kit cutters are not equal. Some have a good rep for giving you a good finished product and well others get by. I don't have any experience with any of them, but I'm sure that the scratch building forum can give you some good suggestions.

I've been working on building myself a CNC router to cut model parts from. Any set of plans needs to be converted to a CAD format for fit check prior to cutting if you expect to not have to fit the parts yourself. While I don't have my CNC router finished yet, I have drawn CAD plans for a couple wings I've built, then printed them on Roll paper, which I glued to wood and cut on the band saw and sanded to the fine printed line. While this is a lot more labor intensive that CNC routing or Laser cutting, the results are the same. If the drawing is good, the wood is good. If the drawing is bad, so is the wood.

Don