Flowjet path cut help

New to the water jet cutting and looking for help in choosing the proper paths and fixing up a vector image.

There are a bunch of lines not connecting and I am also trying to figure what the best way to cut the helmet part out would be so it gives a good strong image.





This is going to hang on my sons door and would like the sword blades to be solid and the letters attached to the line on the bottom.
I am horrible at drawing and being artistic so really need help cleaning up the image connecting lines and taken lines out etc to give the best possible outcome when cutting on the water jet.

Wanting the length to be around 16" and the height of the letters around 3 to 4 inches, and the swords/helmet being around the 6" height range.

I am really new to the cam software etc, any and all help is greatly appreciated.


Regards,
Crown

Not a cam question, this is cad work. I use illustrator for this type of work, much better at drawing and editing drawing than cad is. After you have a tight tracing done you can open it a cad package and scale it to size, find and open ends and overlaps and trim them out. From there you then convert all splines to arcs (or lines - poly lines suck if you want to change anything and can leave to faceted edge if done without care) so stay with arcs. Then import that dxf into your cutting out machine.
illustrator and corel both have auto trace functions, sometimes they work - I wouldn't bank on it with this image tho.

I have none of the programs, they are all at work and no time during work to mess around with it, not even sure they have cam software.

The guy that operates the water jet tells people to do all the work so he can just import and cut, I of course have no clue where to even start by the sounds of your reply.

guess now I am just hoping someone be nice enough to help me out.

I am not a fan of it compared to adobe illustrator or corel but inkscape is the open source freeware illustrator answer. Worth downloading and playing with. You will spend many hours working at this, best to learn on something without a deadline that you care how it looks and does not have to fit anything exactly.
I do not know if flowjet can import a spline or not, this your operator will have to test. If it can not then your cad software at work will have to convert to polylines or lines and arcs depending on what it is.

well I guess I will give it a shot, not clue on what lines to add or take out to get the proper negative space etc for cutting out but will play around with it.

was really hoping someone would help out and do it for me though.

Maybe someone learning cad on here will do it? It is not as easy to get right as a 1 hr job. I can give pointers that help me out on this type of work...
First I would trace outline as close as possible on a 6x6 to 8x11 piece of tracing paper, using printer or copier to blow up image to that size. Then scan or even import a phone image taken from straight above of tracing. this new base line image I would convert to black and white, not even grey scale- this eliminates the guassian blur on jpegs. then start with pen tool and put a point at each tangent of a small shape, ignoring slope handles completely at this stage. once you have one edge with anchors work the handles, if points are at tangents you have a good idea of direction, length and weight is by eye, keeping all slopes symmetric on first edit is best until you have a feel for the shapes and the way the handle weights work. I add anchors as I need to, my copy editor that does kerning for me is an illustrator wizard and screams that I use to many anchors- she can draw a mona lisa with 5 anchors I think. I do not trim shapes in graphics program, I am more comfortable once in cad to trim and do truing work. I also add islands and tabs for cutting in cad, that is post getting final vector model.

If you have a graphics tablet (surface or fujitsu Wacom tablet) then there is a different approach, which is the direction I have moved to. Still old school at work with desktop.

Maybe I will try the tracing method and then cut out the parts I think need cutting out in the paper then perhaps take a photo of that then try the illustrator method to get my lines.

Hopefully that works but until then I will keep my fingers crossed that someone may perhaps do it for me.