Making my first clock

Easel
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Hello there, I am new to easel and I want to make a clock for my dining room. Can anybody tell me how I can allign the letters 30 deg apart in a circle ?

Also, how can I leave the letters and have x-carve take everything else out ?

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1B2D5B84-3555-4F38-995A-7C0E22950626
1B2D5B84-3555-4F38-995A-7C0E229506262592Ă—1936 2.04 MB

Here is one that I did. Make a pocket To the desired depth. I would use .1of an inch. Then place the numbers in with zero cut depth. Placement came be done using the degrees of rotation on the drop down window and side into position. @BjornHreinsson

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For carving the letters/numbers in relief (carving around them rather than carving them out), @PhillipLunsford is correct. Place a shape at the desired cut depth (i.e. 0.1"), then place your characters on top of that shape at a shallower cut depth (i.e. 0" - anything less than the cut depth of the shape underneath will work). Make sure the shape that will be cut out is “beneath” your characters (right-click > send to back). If you basically wanted the clock face to be flat, with all of the characters sticking out, you could use a single circle the size of your clock face.

I’m not sure there’s a way to set the numbers at the “perfect” positions from within Easel. You could make some lines (skinny boxes) centered to your clock face (use the center dot positioning reference in the Shape tab to set the line/skinny box center point the same as your clock face circle), then rotate them to the appropriate angles (i.e. 30°, 60°, 90°, etc.) and use them as guides. You could use another circle as a guide for radial distancing.

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you can align the centers centers of the numbers manually but it takes a bit of effort and may just be easier to eyeball it (you can also use the same method to manually make your hour/minute marks)

  1. create the circle for your dial
  2. create a smaller circle (or line) aligned where you want one of your numbers (or lines) to be (it must be completely inside the dial circle. this is just for positioning, you can delete it later)
  3. select both (click one, shift + click the next)
  4. making sure the position mode is set to center, type in a rotation amount
  5. deselect the smaller circle
  6. Repeat for each number / line

then

  1. in Machine > Advanced: make sure “enable pinning shapes” is checked
  2. for each number circle, click on it and in the shape tab click on the pushpin icon at the top
  3. when you create a number you can select both the number and the circle it goes with, then use the alignment tools to center it to that circle.
  4. afterward you can deselect the number, and delete the alignment circle for it.
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