So. Cal. Checking in

[Chuck Sales]

Hi all,
After 37 years at an aerospace company in San Diego (mostly management in Production Development and Labs), I retired in March of this year. Not one to sit still for long, I bought a 5X10' CNC plasma table plus a mill and lathe (both conventional). While I have limited experience with Catia and Solid Works, the 2D, "straightforwardness" of Qcad lends itself nicely to my plasma table activities (X and Y and just a little Z). My shop is located in the corner of my Son-in-law's automotive shop (gear and trans), so most of my activities thus far have been is support of their work. I've been toying with importing a .jpeg and creating a 2D model from it simply by tracing. Between scaling down from the jpeg and accurately locating features such as holes, imagine a transmission adapter plate, I've come across more than a few challenges. I also wonder if it's possible to "constrain" a particular feature's dimension to lock it while modifying features around it.
Looks like my intro turned into a question, sorry.
Chuck Sales

[Husky]

Hello Chuck - welcome to the Forum!

I've been toying with importing a .jpeg and creating a 2D model from it simply by tracing. Between scaling down from the jpeg and accurately locating features such as holes, imagine a transmission adapter plate, I've come across more than a few challenges. I also wonder if it's possible to "constrain" a particular feature's dimension to lock it while modifying features around it.
Looks like my intro turned into a question, sorry.
Chuck Sales

I'm not sure that I understood this correctly but I like to tell you how I would handle this task.
Open the drawing,
create a new Layer for your Bitmaps,
Insert the Bitmap (*.jpg) into the drawing on this particular layer - for the moment don't worry about the right scale of the bitmap,
switch to another layer (0, Contour ???)
Trace the jpg - try to be as accurate as possible,
after you are done - switch the Bitmap Layer invisible,
take a reference measurement of your traced drawing / compare it to the "real world" measurement of your bitmap and scale it to that. Now it should be very close to that what you are looking for.
If you need to protect entities like Dimension etc etc against manipulation you can put them on a separate layer and then just "Look" the Layer.