Looking to buy a hobby CNC machine and need advice.

[William Adams]

Yes, you could do that in either Inkscape or Carbide Create --- it's actually a tutorial I worked up a while back --- I'll send you a link in a PM.

[Bill George]

Perfect Thanks! I did watch the tutorial about creating the grid in mm's, and using the biser tool to create shapes in Inkscape. I can use Carbide Create for all the other pieces such as the head of the guitar and bridge, fingerboard etc that looks very easy and straight forward. The challenge is the shape of the guitar.

William, if you dont mind just a couple other questions. Is it possible to import a photo of a half shape of the guitar on grid paper in mm's into Carbide Create, create a grid, and size it correctly then use the (not sure what it's called) the tracing tool to trace out the shape? Or can you import a photo into Inkscape and do the same? Getting the guitar shape in there seems to be the hardest thing as I would rather not have to recreate the shape with the Biser tool on a grid since I already have the templates made and drawn up on grid paper anyway. Sorry to bother you with so many questions ..... Ahaw!

Depending on what program you are using (I use Corel Draw) and the quality of the photo or best case single line drawing your tracing could be a big time waster and headache. You will find the tracing has lots of interruptions, squiggly lines and not connected intersections. Which if your just going to treat as a raster image and engrave, no issue. But using as a CAD file its a whole other thing. I have found sometimes just redrawing is the easy and fast way.

[Michael Thames]

Depending on what program you are using (I use Corel Draw) and the quality of the photo or best case single line drawing your tracing could be a big time waster and headache. You will find the tracing has lots of interruptions, squiggly lines and not connected intersections. Which if your just going to treat as a raster image and engrave, no issue. But using as a CAD file its a whole other thing. I have found sometimes just redrawing is the easy and fast way.

Hum .... Maybe I'll try it both ways, cant hurt to learn the hard way..... ha! Thanks Bill.