So, based on the success of the pen case concept, one of my friends over on the Bark River forum asked me if I could do a case for a knife. This caused some head-scratching, on the general method of programming a shape like that, but my wife came to the rescue with a bit of photoshop-ninja. She took a top-down photo and traced it into black and white for me, then I imported it to V-Carve and vectorized it. The photo was (at my request) taken next to a ruler, so I was able to scale the vector to fit, then add .050 all around to give clearance. A couple of finger-grips were tossed in for good measure, and I set it up to run.
Not a perfect fit, my scaling in length was just about an eighth-inch off, but pretty darn close. Next shot will have it just about nailed down, and I’ll add the pockets for hinges, magnets, and general case shape.
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Nice, I am doing this exact same thing for folding knives, and going to have them 1/2 in wood, and 1/2 out, with rare earth magnets to hold them in place. Great job.
I use Easel, and wish Easel would have a better ruler to use so you could see at least 1/4 1/2 and 3/4 measurements so I can scale them much better.
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Sounds like a good plan to me. Right after I cut this one out, I’ve figured out a better way to scale it. I’m just going to create a rectangle of the dimensions it’s supposed to be, scale the graphic until it fits that perfectly, then expand for clearance and cut it. I just won’t program a toolpath for the square, so it will be construction geometry. In easel, you could just delete it once you’d finished the scaling…
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@DanBrown
That’s awesome! I’m planning on doing knife handle scales almost the same way. My plan is to scan the knife blank, then import/vectorize/design the scales to fit the profile.
Chris
Looks awesome. I’d love to make one to hold steak knives in a drawer, with the knife vertical (blade down).
You can always check the size of an object in the Shape menu
Should work just fine, this actually worked a lot better than I was expecting. 
A scanner works great for this aswell and is to scale! Just trace in a cad program and import through some cam software and your good.
Yep, and if I had one I could scan flat, it’d be really easy. 
That was more or less how this was done anyway, just from a photo straight down instead.
That’s one reason why I wanted to start with a blade blank, so it would lay flat on the scanner glass, so no issues with parralax…
Chris
As already mentioned, I have had best luck with perfectly level parallel camera setup and then using any object as scale. Possibly something more exact than a ruler. Possibly a quarter and then mic the quarter to get an exact measurement. Looks awesome though! And a pretty successful first run!
Of course, if you HAVE the item in your hand, you can always just measure a long dimension on it, and use that to set the scale… And yeah, scanning a blade blank seems like a very good way to do it.
