I just bought QCAD. It’s a simple and easy to learn drawing program. It’s cheap, costs $33 and there is a lot of good tutorials on YouTube. I’ve used it to make a scale 1:1 blueprint of the Fleeger rifle in the book “The American long rifle, its art and evolution” by David Hansen. This book has great pictures for making blueprints and all the measurements need for scaling the draw. I used the picture on page 167 for the blueprint. The picture is 9inches long, the 1:1 scale print is 57 13/16 inch. Took me only 1,5 hours to do a stock pattern and I’m no computer whiz. Ask my kids. I’ll go through the steps.
Take picture of the rifle, pays to use as high a pixel resolution as possible. It makes tracing the picture easier. I’ll explain why later. Store on computer.
Start QCAD. Look at the box with two columns of buttons on the left side of the screen. Press the button with the mountains on. It’s the one I’m pointing to.
This opens your computer files, chose the picture you want.
The picture is now on your drawing board.Next you must reduce the size of the picture to scale 1:1. This is where it can get a bit confusing. The picture in the book is 9inches long, but the Qcad thinks it is 212 inches long. That’s because the pixels on the QCad screen are a lot bigger than the pixels in the camera. According to the book the rifle barrel is 42 3/16 inch = 1071,56mm (Qcad is metric). Look again in the box on the left, press the button with the ruler. This starts a tool that let you measure sizes of things in the picture. The “real “size of the barrel in the picture is 3861,66mm (152”). Click On the rifle picture to chose it. You will see blue boxes in all the corners of the picture. Look on the right-hand side of the screen an open the box called “Property Editor”. Look at Specific properties at the lines Width and Heigth. These show the size of the whole picture. Now look at the lines Width factor and Heigth factor. The numbers enterd here scales the picture. At the moment theres a 1 in both boxes. In the width factor enter the 1071,56(barrel length)/3861,66(barrel picture length) and press enter. QCAD calulates the scale to 0,277487. Copy and past this number into the box “Heigth factor” an press enter. You now have a real life size picture of the rifle.
Now we must learn to use layers. It pays to use different layers for different parts of the drawings. I will explain why as we go along. Look at the column of buttons on the right. Press the top one to open the layer list. The picture of the rifle is on layer 0. Press + to add layers. I’ve added three layers, one each of the parts for the drawing, stock, butt plate and triggerguard. On each layer there are three buttons. Click on the eye to make the layer visible or invisible. The pencil decides which layer you are drawing on. The lock locks the layer against changes. The first picture shows all the layers. In the second picture I’ve make layer 0 invisible and you see only my drawings. In the third picture you see only the trigger guard. This way I can work on the triggerguard without messing up other parts of the blueprint.
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This also allows me to chose which parts of the blueprint I want to print out. For example, only the butt plate. I did this to make paper patterns I glued to butter board to carve masters for casting.
Chose the layer you want, do most of the tracing with the spline tool. It’s the button with the lopsided figure eight on the left hand of the screen. Do a quick tracing with the picture zoomed out. Zoom in and smooth out curves and bumps in your tracing. You can zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. There are a lot of different tools and methods to use to tweak the pattern. Check out you tube tutorials.
To print out a stock pattern, first make sure that only the layers you want to print are visible all other layers inviable. In this case I am printing out only the stock pattern.
click on the print preview button. This transfers the drawing to the printing screen.The drawing is now on the printing screen. Notice the screen shows only 1 piece of paper. If you press print, you will only get this part of the drawing.Click on the multiple page button. Chose one row and 8 columns. This prints the draw over 8 pages.
Now press the auto center button to fit the drawing to the paper.
Look closely at the drawing. There are dim grey vertical lines that show were the pages overlap. In each corner there is a blue cross on all the page these crosses are printed out on all the pages and are used for lining up the pages correctly for taping together.
Tape the first page to a window. Line up the crosses om the next page and tape them together. Repeat for all the pages. You now have a full-size stock pattern.
Best regards
Rolf
