You have received your PDF downloads - Congratulations. You are half-way there. Now what? Since these PDF's are of the highest quality and very accurate full-sized drawings, you should seek out the best printing solution.
While many customers use such services such as Office Max or Kinkos (and many of these stores can do a very respectable job for you), your first try should be with a commercial digital printing company, such as the type used by architects and engineers. They often have the highest quality and most up-to-date equipment. You will find that in a matter of seconds, these large digital printers can turn out several sets of drawings for you, and these printing companies know about the taboos of resizing prints and the problems that are caused by this.
The PDF drawings are all formatted to print at full-size automatically without any assistance from the printer. The typical guitar plan sheets are sized for metric sized paper called A0 (note that this is slightly smaller than the US size of 36" x 48"). Many of the tools are also on this same size paper, but here you will find more variation. If you are printing the plans in the USA, be sure that the digital printing company does not resize the PDF's to fit the paper. They are all pre-formated and should print without any additional input from the operator.
Our Ukulele Plans are are sized for 24" x 36" paper, which is also called Architectural Size "D".
How to Deliver The PDF Plans To The Printing Company
1. Copy your PDF files that you download here onto a read/write CD or DVD.
2. Copy your PDF files onto a memory stick
3. Most digital printers will accept emailed files, which can be sent and printed when you arrive to pick them up.Why PDF's?
With digital plans you can conveniently print half-sized sets for reference, often called 50% sized sets. Also, if you have access to a printer that prints 11" x 17" paper, you can print your own reduced sized sets. Also portions or details of the plans can be printed on any printer.
Many builders will want to print limited areas of the print, like a bridge layout for instance. This can easily executed with our plans and a letter-sized ink jet or laser printer. In the page setup of the printer, select the 100% option to keep everything to scale and you can then print a small area or if you need to print a larger area, it can be printed on multiple sheets and then carefully taped together.
With the advent of tablets and their wide usage, many customer have found it very convenient to sidestep the "hard copy" step and build most of their instruments using only a tablet, such as the Mac iPad.
