Not that I know of, other than by hand work.  I use QCad to do my drafting.  It'll let me lay a jpg under the work that I'm doing; I do that, then I look for the line/circle/whatever that'll fit nicely into the middle of the expanded line.

I put this in stunt design because I was not sure where else to ask this. Is there a simple way to turn three view and other drawings iinto better black and white only drawings ? Seems any three view I try to expan gets so blurry Its unreadable and much of the white ares turn shades of gray.

     If we are talking digital images, jack up the contrast. Actually, that would work with photo-reproduction (they make special super-high-contrast copy film) or Xerox machines.
 
    Brett

M/c? I'm considering buying a wide format printer for roughly $150. Nothing great but will serve 2 functions.
Printing both plans and printing wing skins on silkspan or tissue paper.

It's pretty amazing sometimes what you can do on your PC with a zero-cost graphics program like Irfanview to recover and improve images.

Here's an example of a friend's "business logo" (for Blind Hog Research, where "even a blind hog gets an occasional acorn") scanned from a faded, yellowed sheet over 25 year's old. I thought the result came out pretty good, good enough to have on the wing of a stunt ship!

(Imagine what someone could do with a Mac running full-pop Photoshop or similar.) ;->

L.

"It's no credit to anyone to work too hard." -Ed Howe

Gentlemen,

Which is the best format to scan a plan from a magazine?

                  XXX.jpg
                  XXX.pdf

What should the resolution be set on the scanner?

             dots/inch      300; 600; 1200

Thanks for the info.

T Michael Jennings                     
Knoxville, TN.

HI T. Michael,

Although I know there is a difference in jpg and pdf, I don't know EXACTLY what it is.  I do kow that all my pdf files open in Adobe while I can open jpgs in other programs.   

I do artwork for decals in coreldraw which is a vector based (mathematical formulas I'm told) which reproduces sharper image when enlarged or shrunk that "raster" programs like some of the "raster" (sp?) programs that come installed on the computers.  Maybe jpg and pdf are similar?

I do know that the higher you set the resolution when scanning, the better the copy is when printing.  Especially when enlarging.  And the higher setting takes longer to scan.

Not much help, but I know the guys who scan plans seem to prefer the pdf format, and I would scan as high as I could.

Bill

While you can blow up magazine plans and small sketches to a larger size, typically the lines get wider and wider.  Several graphics programs are available that are supposed to converts raster images to drawings- Corel Draw is one, Photoshop also, I believe.  I've never had any success with Corel.  It generates tons and tons of lines that take forever to clean up.  I've had the best luck, like Tim Wescott, drawing over a JPG image.  It is pretty easy to set lines up to follow the center of the line on the graphic.  Knowing key measurements from the real model or plane helps a lot to set the overall sizes.

One thing to watch out for- many of the plans I've seen published lately in magazines are just pieces of the plans, and often they use different sizes and scaling so it is very difficult to draw up for use.  Some of them use different scales on different pieces of the plane.  In one case the top and side views were different scales so the wing chord and thickness did not match.  Fortunately I knew the designer and he gave me the correct numbers.

Good Luck.