Quick question about scaling

Hi guys I'm still fairly new to 3d printing and I was just wondering when I download a cad from thingyverse or something similar are the cads set to there proper height from the designer? For example I wanted to download a lightsaber replica and when i open it up with Cura it seems to be way to large and i have to scale it down but i have no idea how big it has to be and it seems to be a lot of work to work out how big each of the 14 sections need to be to get the proper height if you know what i mean. I also wanted to print a robot but if i have to scale it myself i have no idea how big each peace needs to be before printing the rest of it to make things fit.

Is it about 25.4 times larger than needed?

'I think they might be. I was looking around and I did read that some stl files are imported in inches not mm but i'm still unsure about how to scale it down. How do I scale it down exactly by 25.4?

In S3D you can choose the exact % you want. I'm sure Cura has something of the kind, probably meshmixer too.

some people still design models in inches (why ?) all slicers assume models are in millimetres.

So you can get some odd results importing models in inches. usually they appear really small. But I did have one a week or so back that appeared really big. No idea why.

But generally that's the base cause of weird sized models imported into slicers.

I use Blender which has a very good metric system built in for inches or MM.. but I'd agree with curious, as most slicers assume it's mm and you have to convert to inches (if its an option at all)

Blender metrics:
http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/bl...rial-units.php

use a scale of 0.001 for real world values and always CTRL-A reset your scale before you export the STL.