Vectric Customer

When my son bought property on Smith Lake I thought it would be nice to have a map hanging in the Lake house.

Beutiful love the color choice for the water. really makes it pop. Thanks for sharing.

Very nice!

Living in northern Minnesota, I have been wanting to get into making lake contour maps, but just haven't had time yet to convert all those DNR pdf files...

Dave,

About half of the MN 10,000 (21,871 over 2.5 acres) lakes are vectors if you can manipulate ESRI ArcMap shapefiles. I bring them into ArcMap and then export as dxf files and then they can be brought into VCP and manipulated. I do the contours as steps and I have not spent the time to convert to smooth curves yet. People seem to like them even if they are steps instead of smooth. On reclaimed redwood, spray painted and then sanded.

http://www.mngeo.state.mn.us/chouse/water_lakes.html

Thanks, I ll check into that.
Dave

I've been doing similar work in Wisconsin.

bigduke6,

Is your map 3d or are you pocketing and then filling with a resin to make it level. I would think a 3d would be a little distracting to sit on if that is a bench.

Here are some examples of my lake maps. Strictly gifts for friends.

I live in MN also and have done several lake maps signs and cribbage boards.

I am SO new to all of this, but would really like to make a map of Long Lake (Washington) where I live.

Question: How do I go about doing this? Basically, how do I take a map and import this into VCarve?

Thanks!

First you must find an image of the lake. You can do this by googling or scanning one into your computer. I’ve had to clean some maps up by using a photo app. Once you have a good image you can use Vcarve to turn it into a vector image which can be then programmed to be machined. There are tutorials available to teach you how to do this on the Vectric website. I hope this helps.
Ron

Washington State does have some spatial data for lakes and limited amounts of bathometric data which is really what you are looking for. I downloaded their lake data from the WA DNR site and loaded it into my GIS software. Turns out there are 19 lakes named Long Lake so I would need more data before I could help. You could import a jpg or pdf if you have a scanned copy. I have done it but it sure is time consuming to trace. Most times the create vectors in VCP from a scanned copy is more fixing and time consuming that just heads up tracing. If someone has a digital copy of something that is the way to go.

What I have done in the past is load bathometric data into gis software, select the desired lake with all the bathometric contours and export as a dxf. Load that into VCP and after sizing for the board figure out how deep to make the lake on the board. Say you have 7 contours then to fit on a 4/4 board you could go in 1/8" increments for each pocket. I would start with 0 depth and pocket inside the line to .125. The next contour I would cut a pocket of .125 starting at a depth of .125. Then the next pocket with a depth of .125 starting at a depth of .25, keep repeating until you get to the last contour which represents the bottom.

I would welcome comments or suggestions with VCP ver.9 on how I could make them smooth sides on the lake rather than the steps of each contour. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

It's Long Lake in Stevens County as part of the Spokane River.
I've looked online and can't find a good bathymetric map like you suggested.
Any help would be appreciated.
I'm trying to setup a document for my Woodshop class to work with/on.
Thanks.

lsvien -

Below is a link that "maybe" I could use? What's your thoughts?

http://media.spokesman.com/photos/2016/ ... c2ebfb384b

Looks like a pretty good place to start. I used a similar type map to start with and used coral draw to erase all the areas I didn't want to show up when I "vectorized" it. Good luck with your project.