Hello, I am not new to wood working, BUT I have never turned before. I just started and have turned a few small objects. When I started to view YouTube for information, I fell in love with the idea of Segments. I have a couple of small bowls I did. Learning curves.
I have been playing with Segment Pro and Lamination Pro. I have two main questions.
1. after creating the Eagle and saving it, HOW do you save only one and rotate it to a horizontal view, inside Segment Pro.
2. In Segment pro, under Plans, I opened the "Eagle Bowl" and resized it. HOW do you resize the Lamination Pro version to give you the cutting information for the Eagle.
I think that these two should be connected so what happens to one happens to the other. In my job I use SolidWorks, what happens to one part travels thru the entire project, part, Assembly and drawings.
Multi-Generation Lamination is a remarkable process that is not particularly difficult, but extremely difficult to visualize and that is why I decided to write Lamination PRO. Simplified, the process is: 1) create a board from strips, 2) cut it into identical strips an a constant angle and 3) reassemble the strips, flipping every other strip left-to right, top-to-bottom, both or neither.
Repeat this process as many generations as you like. In all cases, every two of the strips create a 'Repeating Unit'. If you flip every other strip, you will always see a chevron with the left strip declining and the right strip inclining. However, if you make a new generation by not flipping strips, you will have a Repeating Unit that no longer looks like a chevron, but every two strips is still a Repeating Unit and you have to start thinking of it as a left strip and a right strip. When you cut a board like this to make the next generation, you still have to make your cuts through every other strip.
The Eagle design is an example of this. To make the first generation, you use the standard flip process to make a chevron. To make the second and third generations, you don't do any flipping and because of this, every Repeating Unit now has two identical strips in it - one left and one right. This means that when you make the final 'Slide-Flip' step, your finished design is one Repeating Unit that has an eagle on the left strip and on the right strip. But there is one slight problem - in each strip, the left edge of the strip starts at the wing and the eagle's head is at the right edge of each strip. When all of the repeating units are glued together, you have a continuous board with a series of completed eagles, all rotated the wrong direction from how you want to use them. This is a characteristic of the multi-generation process and like Tuesday follows Monday - that's just the way it is.
Fortunately, you can just cut the board into individual eagles, rotate them and trim them to size. Easy, peasy.
Imagine trying to make the same eagle using a traditional method called 'stacking' where you cut small pieces of wood, glue them together, sand edges, cut more small pieces, stack (glue) them to what you have already created, sand edges and continue this process until you have made one eagle and then do this for all the eagles you need. The multi-generation approach can be done in a fraction of the time with far greater accuracy and you are never working with small pieces of wood.
Regarding your comment about Solidworks - I have also used it when I had access to it. At $4,000 plus $1,300 annual subscription, comparing it to my $79 Lamination PRO is kinda like comparing a Ferrari to a go-cart. Both have four wheels but that's where the comparison ends. They have in excess of 60 programmers where I have me spending about 20% of my time programming. Even thinking about making the two programs interact with each other makes my teeth itch and that's never a good sign.
Fortunately, you just need to take the measurements from Segment PRO or Woodturner PRO and resize the Lamination PRO design to fit those measurements. It's trial and error but goes very quickly. By just changing the First Cut Width, you change the Repeating Unit size in a precise linear amount. As you decrease the width of the repeating unit, you also have to compensate by going back to the Laminate Wizard and reducing the thickness of the strips used to make the laminated board. You should be able to make the finished design in Lamination PRO fit your desired width and height in a couple minutes. However, in the case of the eagle design, you have to divide the repeating unit width by two to get the rotated height of the eagle and resize the Export Area (the red rectangle) to give you the width of the eagle. Again: easy, peasy.
I'm soon going to be working more on Lamination PRO as there is more functionality I want to add for making it easier to make things like rosettes for guitars, bodies for solid guitars, etc. Unfortunately, Lamination PRO is the best-kept secret in all of woodworking and I'm trying to change that.
