Quick Saline Sulfate etching question!

[Coniac]

Hi all! My question is more with the actual stencilling than the etching itself. I was wondering if any of you who have done this before could advise me on some measurments or a program that'll accurately print it on to the page. I figured I'd just get a piece of regular white printer paper and just cutting it to fit, then measuring it out. But I'm not gonna lie, I've never had to print something to match a certain size. Also I'm using PnP blue so that's why I'm wanting to kinda get it right on the first try, it being expensive and all. I'm planning on going to my local Kinko's since I don't have a laser printer. And advise would be greatly appreciated. If it matters, I'm planning on doing my first etch on hilt style 1 ( 7" double female, no grooves or any of that).thanks again y'all

[sks1138]

When I do my patterns for etching I tape a piece of paper
around the part. Then draw my pattern. Take the paper off. Scan it into the computer and redraw it in Illustrator. Since i work in a print shop I get my patterns cut out of adhesive vinyl. I use the acid etching method.

No matter how you draw your pattern it's important to split the design somewhere that will be easy to line up if it wraps around the part. Wrapping the paper around helps with the measurment and the layout of the design.

[rlobrecht]

I had terrible luck with toner transfer, and finally found forum posts elsewhere stating that some toner brands don't work well for transfer.

I ended up using my wife's Cricut machine to cut stencils out of vinyl. Their designer is scaled in inches and seems to be true to size.

Illustrator or Photoshop can print true size. You can also save to a PDF that Acrobat Reader can print true sized (as long as you turn off all the scaling). I would assume that other reasonably high end graphics packages would work as well.

[Mineral]

At the low end of things, MS Word (and maybe Google docs) has a ruler you can turn on to print things to size. Put your graphic in Word and scale it.

[darth_chasm]

(as long as you turn off all the scaling)

^^This

I work in graphics and I can't tell you how many times someone will come back and say "you sent us the wrong size... why is it so big... it's all blurry..." My response is always "did you print it out at 100%?" The answer is usually "I don't know." Unfortunately, a lot of software will be set, by default, to fill/scale to the media.