simple gasket copy and cutting it out

[stan kern]

https://youtu.be/GetscRZQNVg tracing an engine gasket and laser cutting it
just to show how quick and accurate this can be done
This is a simple example, but sometimes people ask for simple examples

[Keith Downing]

Interesting. What material is that gasket made out of?

[stan kern]

I think it was a cork material cut like carboard

[Bill George]

So its a $3000 Min digitizing table system, I think I would really spring for that as I do like one gasket...... never.

[Michael Henriksen]

I would just stick it on a flatbed scanner and trace it in CAD. Alternatively just draw it from measurements as it's a very simple shape.

[stan kern]

agree with all comments but there are people out there that find all the tech stuff hard, this is a board and a pen simple
and any body can run it.
I was asked to show the ease of it
plasma operators like this

[Mike Audleman]

You can do similar things using a common digitizing tablet like a Wacom. If the part is too big to fit all at once on smaller tablets, you can do it in sections as long as you have common reference points, say screw holes or obvious corners as references to join the sections together.

The example part above is perfect as it has holes you can use as index points to be able to work in sections and assemble them into one piece in your drawing program.

[Keith Outten]

Stan,

Your thread is timely for me as I have been cutting gaskets for a friend of mine who is rehabbing a 1940 International Harvester tractor. The gaskets he needed were for his carburetor and magneto, both were small and very detailed...not the kind of gasket anyone would like to cut manually.

One gasket I was able to scan and the other he made a transfer to paper from the casting that I scanned. In the past I have been able to take a picture of a gasket and then do the vector conversion. No matter what method there is always a bit of adjustment necessary to get the size just right and to verify the hole locations.

Cutting gaskets with a laser engraver is easy money :)
.

[Mike Null]

Years ago, I think with version 11 Corel offered a promotion with a Wacom tablet. I bought the Corel issue and received the Wacom tablet which still works very well. I just used it last week to trace some signatures that wouldn't trace in Corel. It was flawless.

[Keith Downing]

Stan,

Your thread is timely for me as I have been cutting gaskets for a friend of mine who is rehabbing a 1940 International Harvester tractor. The gaskets he needed were for his carburetor and magneto, both were small and very detailed...not the kind of gasket anyone would like to cut manually.

One gasket I was able to scan and the other he made a transfer to paper from the casting that I scanned. In the past I have been able to take a picture of a gasket and then do the vector conversion. No matter what method there is always a bit of adjustment necessary to get the size just right and to verify the hole locations.

Cutting gaskets with a laser engraver is easy money :)
.


That's pretty neat. Were your gaskets also the cork or cardboard type material Keith? Does it have a plastic coating?

Just curious, no real life application ideas (yet). Haha

[John Lifer]

Stan's work reminded me of a just some of the easy things the laser can do. I spent a couple of minutes in Coreldraw laying out the 8 holes to match my palm sander. I have a roll of adhesive discs that I use with it, but no holes for dust extraction.
So I cut a pile of them today. Power at 50% cut thru about a dozen at a time, easy and quick waste of my time and laser.

[Lee DeRaud]

I would just stick it on a flatbed scanner and trace it in CAD.What he said, although I'd use Corel for the drawing.
I have a Wacom, probably got it the same way Mike Null did, but I wouldn't have a clue how to calibrate it to the Corel screen to get absolute dimensions at a precision I'd be happy with. The scanner doesn't seem to have that problem.

[Bert McMahan]

You can calibrate scanner images or even regular camera images fairly well by adding a known object to the picture. For example, add a ruler next to the gasket you're scanning, then trace a line in Corel Draw along the ruler. You can then see what the length is in Corel and can scale the image until the traced line is exactly 12" or 6" or whatever.

[Lee DeRaud]

You can calibrate scanner images or even regular camera images fairly well by adding a known object to the picture. For example, add a ruler next to the gasket you're scanning, then trace a line in Corel Draw along the ruler. You can then see what the length is in Corel and can scale the image until the traced line is exactly 12" or 6" or whatever.Yup. Although (at least with my scanner) if I scan to PDF, then import the PDF to Corel, the drawing is already 1:1 in Corel coordinates to the limit of the scan resolution.

With the Wacom, the tablet edges are mapped to the screen edges, not to any absolute dimension. Add to that the problem that the Wacom is 4:3 aspect and my current screens are all 16:9. There may well be some software available to get around that problem, but that tablet is 12 years old, so it's probably more trouble than it's worth to go looking for it.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

I create a lot of gaskets. I actually find them fun to do and like the challenge of getting it right the first time. (I test on plain paper.)

Stan, I think that's a great video and tutorial. There are probably countless people that could benefit from it.

I use a combination of methods along with flatbed scan to PDF or BMP; take a photo; rubbing a pencil on paper over the item; and most of the time, I take measurements and do it all freehand in Corel using the Bezier & other tools. To me, it's just a combination of circles and rounded squares.

I too have the wacom tablet that was part of the Corel deal. Over the years, I was having more and more problems with it working on newer versions of software. I was so disappointed to have to retire it from daily use on my Win7 computer. That wacom mouse has been my all-time favorite mouse and it never needed batteries! I still use it on my old XP computer for when I need to use some legacy software. It drives people bonkers when they have to use my computer... In the photo below, you wacom fans will recognize it. In order for my Win7 optical mouse to work, I had to put a cheap mousepad over the tablet.

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[Keith Outten]

That's pretty neat. Were your gaskets also the cork or cardboard type material Keith? Does it have a plastic coating?

Just curious, no real life application ideas (yet). Haha

The material wasn't cork or cardboard, it was a very hard paper composite pretty much standard material as far as I know. No plastic coating either but it cut very easy.

I remember a few years ago I was at a local business that sells rubber sheet, hoses and a bunch of other products looking for a flexible rubber sheet for a job I was doing. I mentioned to the sales clerk that I was going to laser cut the job and the clerk was surprised. I was asked if I could provide the service for their customers but I didn't give it much thought at the time because my laser was only 35 watts and I figured it might not be up to the task of cutting thick rubber sheet material. I should visit them again and leave them a business card and a couple samples.

I have a Wacom CTH 460 tablet that is probably large enough to use for my friends gaskets but I didn't think about using it last week. I have been using my scanner or my camera for a long time for these kinds of jobs I forgot about the tablet. When I scan gaskets I never pay attention to the scale, I adjust the size in Corel Draw after I have done the vector conversion. I measure the extents of the gasket and adjust either one of the axis in the drawing.

[stan kern]

Everybody is right ,its an expensive board that a scanner could do .I once scanned a clock dial and the node editing was very time consuming
the drawing board may cut down the time
If you are a cad person you can walk right through this stuff
The eagle and the woodworking sign were drawn and it was easy but there was editing
The heron turned out ok , but the other diagrams were from a 1936 woodworking magazine that showed there plans
in a grid pattern for manual re-draw, these were easily traced out (scanning would not help )
Also these drawing boards can be 20 feet long and will copy out large parts , the one i use is 11feet by 54in wide
and i have traced out large parts (a horse template)
Like i said before there are a few people that would prefer a simple quick draw to dxf

[Joseph Shawa]

CorelDraw has a "trace bitmap" command that works pretty well and then export to .dxf or send directly to Laser.

[Joseph Shawa]

Is the imported .PDF already a vector file?

[Lee DeRaud]

Is the imported .PDF already a vector file?If you're referring to my post regarding import from a scanner, no. It's a bitmap, but scaled in Corel at 100%, assuming you did the default import, and trivially easy to trace.

[stan kern]

What about if the part was intricate and 6 feet long by 4 feet wide , how can that be handled

[Ron Klein]

I restore Model A Fords and found that often the replacement gaskets are not the right size. This is sometimes due to the gasket material shrinking after it was cut out. Spritzing with water swells them back into shape. But a scanned laser copy will not expand when softened with water to the correct size.

What I have been doing with smaller pieces is to scan the actual metal part. You know it didn't shrink. I have an 11x14 scanner and can do even bigger if I overlap with care. I've even made gaskets for rare carburetors that are fairly complicated. As long as you have a flat surface it is fairly easy.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

What about if the part was intricate and 6 feet long by 4 feet wide , how can that be handled

I would probably refer them to someone like you who has a laser that can handle that size! :) (Although I would be tempted to create the gasket drawing by hand just for fun, I would only be able to test the pattern in small sections.)

Like I said. Great video and tutorial.

[Kev Williams]

What about if the part was intricate and 6 feet long by 4 feet wide , how can that be handled
Depends on how intricate-- or more accurately, what kind of tolerances are you expecting? And what are you reproducing from?

If you're scanning a part to reproduce it, you can take photo's and scan and vectorize those.
Once in vector form, you can upscale to any size.

To reproduce something that big, you need a machine big enough to handle the lesser dimension in one shot,
and can handle doing the long dimension in sections (pass thru door, or as in my pics below, a 180 flip)...

If you need to reproduce something original in actual size, such as the houseboat instrument panel below, there's 3 options I've used:
1- Taking photo's as noted above, then tweaking the results to match the original--

2- Awhile back I did a similar gauge panel for an RV, what I did was tape enough pieces of paper together until the panel would fit-
then I traced the outline and holes onto the paper. Then I'd cut the pages apart and just flatbed-scan each piece...
Before cutting, I'd draw an X as a marker across the paper seam, this allows each scan to be superimposed correctly.
It worked quite well---

3- for the project below, I did the paper thing, but I didn't want to scan and trace each piece, so I taped together 1/16" increment drafting paper...
I determined my 0/0 bottom right starting point, lined up the plate on the the paper, then just drew the border and all the holes.
Rather than hacking it all up and scanning it, I just used the paper to find all the coordinates. Since the right side was nearly a mirror
image of the left, I only dimensioned the the left half, drew it up in Corel, made a copy, flipped it and moved it into position..
It turned out the original panel's holes were all centered on good ol' easy to deal with fractional dimensions, and I didn't have
to line up new holes to old hole cutouts, so tweaking was easy. There were a few easy adjustments the customer wanted, no problem...
The whole tracing/vectorizing procedure took about 45 minutes

The original panel,

359793

my IS7000 cutting the new one (in 2 setups),
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the new panel,
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and the finished product after anodizing and engraving in the Triumph (which was big enough ;) )
359796

[stan kern]

I picked the gasket trace as a demo of the drawing board, these can be expensive boards especially if it was 20 feet long
I saw one that a company used for counter tops, it was impressive, they used cardboard at the clients
house and then digitized the trace and cut it out.
Its all about time i guess if you spent the time and the editing you can do most things, some people don't
have that sort of time , they want a quick trace
Its all about time i guess if you spent the time and the editing you can do most things,
some people don't
have that sort of time , they want a quick trace
I scan some things but i also use a lot of old woodworking
magazines with the black grid pattern and thats a lot of erasing

[Bill George]

Kev, It looks great!

[Mike Null]

A while back I did a quantity of 3 types of gaskets. The customer sent the dxf drawings and I adjusted them slightly with no issues. But they also sent the gasket material, a paper type available at auto supply stores. Two problems surfaced, one, the paper came in a roll like wall paper and had to be flattened before engraving, second, it was full of moisture. My heat press took care of both issues but I had to press each piece two or three times to get it flat and the volume of steam that resulted from the heat press was surprising.

[Joseph Shawa]

I figured as much but wouldn't it be cool to have CorelDraw just automate the process. BTW there is an online site that will make vector art from your photos https://vectormagic.com/