I’ve been asked to produce some joinery drawings at 1:1 scale for printing to actual size. I do a lot of scaled joinery drawings but have never produced joinery rods before. Has anyone had any experience of this? Any advice on how to approach it? Is it possible to create a custom paper size in Layout that might allow for this kind of thing to be printed?
The joinery in question may be in the region of about 2m by 3m at 1:1 scale, so pretty massive to print out and certainly won’t fit on any standard-sized paper, without splitting across multiple pages.
Mathias Wandel has a PC tool to print larger 1:1 pages in pieces [EVAL or $22]… https://woodgears.ca/bigprint/
Alternatively use Layout and send a large PDF to a print-shop…
I’m sure that @DaveR - one of our sage woodworker experts - will chip in too…
Thanks for the response. I think the large .pdf from layout is going to be the way to go. I’ll be sending it to a joinery company that has a plotter, so printing shouldn’t be an issue.
I just wonder if there is a best practice to set things out, for instance, the plotter is probably capable of printing a sheet of paper at about 1m wide (at any length), so should I make my pages 1m in layout and try to split the drawing across multiple pages myself, or make one massive page to the full size of the joinery and let the plotter/software figure out how to split and arrange the pages?
Personally I make a full size page, then open the pdf in my plotter software and that does the tiling for me. From my experience the less mucking about with the drawing the better.
Thanks @Box this is what I was hoping for. I’ll create a large tester .pdf and send it to the joiner to see if his plotter handles the multiple pages correctly. Certainly will save me a lot of time, if this is the sollution. Cheers.
It is possible to create custom paper sizes in LO. I would do that and as suggested, send the client a PDF. Find out how wide their plotter roll is and use that. Theoretically the other dimension can be what it needs to be although I expect there is some limit in LayOut. If needed you could spread the drawing across multiple sheets without any problem.
By the way, I would put scales at several places on the sheet and oriented in both directions so the final print can be checked. I’ve seen cases where the scaling changes over the length of a sheet on large printouts.
Thanks for both your comments @DaveR and a particularly good piece of advice on the scales. I’ll make sure to do that on my sheets.
I’ll send some text prints off and see how they go.