Rack for SteelFX dies

[kb3gun]

I made this to keep my dies accessible. Simple design that will hang on the wall next to my airbrush station.

[steelfx]

Cool idea! Are those the 4 oz or 8 oz bottles? I should be able to tell, huh?
Bill

[steelfx]

I'm gonna guess 8 oz. It's gonna be funny if I'm wrong.

bw

[kb3gun]

8oz. Good eye Bill.

[tnbndr]

You should make a bunch and Bill can sell them with the dies! or in his store.

[GoingCustom]

You should make a bunch and Bill can sell them with the dies! or in his store.

This!

[kb3gun]

Thanks for the comments. Bill is a very good metal artist in his own right. If he hasn't already designed something similar on his own, I'd be happy to give him the dxf if he wanted it.

[steelfx]

Thanks for the comments. Bill is a very good metal artist in his own right. If he hasn't already designed something similar on his own, I'd be happy to give him the dxf if he wanted it.

I would love to have the DXF. Here's a little known secret: I suck at CAD design. I do not design, compose or draw in CAD. I draw or compose everything in XARA, (it won't save or export as a dxf), save my b/w rendering as a 300dpi jpg., pull that into my Raster to Vector plug-in in BobCad v21 (BobArt), convert to scaled vector/dxf & drag that into my CAD window for clean-up, which there very seldom is any clean-up needed. On lower res. b/w jpgs or bmp's, there's usually some broken lines or segments. I've been doing it that way for so long, that I can go from XARA to the burn table in just a few minutes. usually.

Most of the time, depending on the size of the piece I'm cutting, I'll throw in some 0.045" torch offsets, optimize the whole drawing (one click) and save to my desktop as a DXF. I cut everything up to and including 3/16" plate with fine-cut consumables, just for the kerf width & edge detail retention. Above 3/16", I don't use 'em.

I know there's faster ways, but it's the way I learned & I haven't taken the leap to Sheetcam or something like that.
The only drawback to BobCad, is that I have NOT been able to find a way to insert lead-ins/outs w/o doing it manually, which takes forever.

That's why I mostly "pierce & run", on everything from 16awg up to 10awg., I set my pierce time to 0.10 second, so you have to look pretty hard to find any pierce points.

I tried a demo of Corel Draw & Adobe Illustrator back when I was just getting started, and those programs put me into therapy! Way beyond my intellectual capabilities. When I see y'all talking about Corel, it's like Greek to me.
XARA is easy & I love it. And, it costs a lot less. I use inkscape to convert a bmp or jpg to .ai/.eps, so I've got nodes to work with. Downloaded GIMP, but even it looks too complicated for me.

When I was first learning how to do compositions, I had an art collection that was just 600dpi bmps, and I couldn't merge them into a composition because of the white rectangular background. Gary from SignTorch was on the phone with me for an hour or more (several times, in fact) & walked me through the process of converting bmp to .ai/.eps, so I could merge or overlap images. He helped me a bunch! Jason helped me through some tough re-do's, too. Customer submitted DXF's that weren't at all cut-friendly. It takes a village to raise a plasma-cutter. I had plenty of help when I was getting started. And, I'm grateful for it.

thanks,

Bill

[kb3gun]

Bill,
I just emailed you the file. Thanks again for some great products!

-Smitty

[kb3gun]

Got it hung up this evening.

finishing.jpg (44.09 KiB) Viewed 3071 times

[oldsoulmetal]

Where you going to put the new color?
"Gold Metallic"

[steelfx]

Nice FJ!

[muzza]

Nice FJ!

What FJ?
Only 1 thing in that picture, isn't there

[steelfx]

Nice FJ!

What FJ?
Only 1 thing in that picture, isn't there

Ha! Yeah, I saw the babe. At my age, I'd rather have the FJ!

And either way, if it's got t*ts or tires, you're gonna have problems!

[kb3gun]

Where you going to put the new color?
"Gold Metallic"

I'll just mix it with the other dies... I was going to add a few other spaces for thinner and other colors later on, but I didn't want it any bigger. I can always make some single row racks to hold the particular colors I may be using on a project at a given time.

[mdwalker]

I had a '68 FJ a few years back but the headlights weren't as bright as that one and I never could get that nice rounded look on the back bumper!

[kb3gun]

Mine is a '66. I have LED headlights in mine. I can't afford the headlights that are in the poster.