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Old 11-13-2009, 09:55 PM
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dreadnaut
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Default RE: plans to kit

ORIGINAL: Scar

If you have plans from Ziroli, Palmer or one of the other plans services, check out the Laser Cutting Services. They have the laser cutting programs already for many of those plans. Look in the Scratchbuilding or Kit building forums, or search online for Laser Cutting Services.
This sounds scarier than it is. A laser cutter is noting more than a printer/plotter with a laser instead of a pen. The "program" is just a vector graphic file of the patterns. A laser cutter can even work from a raster file, like a .jpg, or.bmp, but the results will not be precise enough for good quality parts. If you are working from a paper plan, it will have to be scanned, then traced in CAD to produce an accurate laser ready file. Done properly, this involves a skilled drafter who would charge ~$35-$40/hr. Depending on the quality and accuracy of the original plan, this could take as little as an hour for a profile foamy, to 10 or 20 hours for a fine scale model like the ones from Platt and Hostetler (Which are already in CAD files) You could ask for those files, but I bet I would hear them laughing at you from here.

Drawing in CAD is a lot like programming, and the files them selves can be pretty valuable "source code". I would do it for you, and either sell you the code for more than the kit would be worth, or I would get you a kit cut, and sell it to you at a reasonable price, and keep the code for myself. If the plane was your design, we could work a deal where you could sell them as your product, and I would be the supplier. If they were someone else's design, I would try to work a deal with whoever owned the rights to the plan.

ORIGINAL: Scar

If you drew your own plans, then you're probably on your own, unless you want a production run of kits made.
. . . unless you drew the plan in CAD, then you're more than half way there. I am getting a scratch built plane laser cut, but I drew the plans in CAD, so they were pretty much laser ready from the get go.