I have a piece of live edge wood that I need to trace somehow to get a vector into Aspire. What is the best way to trace this piece of wood to get a good vector?
Bring it into a vector drawing program, trace it, scale to fit. Adjust nodes as you see fit.
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If the wood piece is small and you have a scanner, you could lay it on the scanner bed and get a scan. Our HP printer has a scanner on the top and I have used that as a starting point when I need to make something fit something else.
The PC would receive the image as a JPEG and I would then work on the scanned image with software like Inkscape to turn it into a matching SVG.
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That was nice of you to do that, what was your process for doing that.
Thank you very much.
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Copied your image.
Paste into Inkscape.
Use the pen tool to draw some straight lines that roughly represented your stock.
Deleted the picture.
Filled the vector, so you’d see it better.
The whole process took about a minute. You could mess with the nodes to smooth it out. I did nothing with the scale as there was no real reference.
You’re welcome.
I have traced things on paper, then scanned the paper on our printer/ scanner and saved it as a PDF. My drawing program opens a PDF and saves it as a DXF. I usually include some known dimension like a line with points a couple inches apart to check for scale in the drawing program. I then convert the DXF to gcode and run it on my x carve.
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I used NeilFerreri1’s image and saved it to file then opened with Aspire and instant vector around the image. I haven’t scaled it yet but will do that today. I’m thinking of inserting a clock face and carving some sort of Firefighter logo or image next to the clock face. I was a volunteer firefighter for over 33 years and thought it would be a nice project for that piece of wood.
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How long you been waiting to use that one? 
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I take a photo upload to Photoshop, trace it and then fill with black, the whole process takes just a few mimutes.