Converting a SkillsUSA logo to an SVG to use in Carbide Create

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

…(converting) a file to an SVG with which my machine will work. I am trying to create a coin that can be auctioned off in late March. I want to put the state SkillsUSA logo on the front. I have the back already crested. Could I get you to look at the website and tell me which one to download so I can use my drag bit to etch the coin? SkillsUSA.org- Resources- Brand resources- then in the paragraph in red letters, the Brand Portal- then Brand assets or Association Logos- then scroll down to Kansas…

The link in question is:

SkillsUSA Brand Assets | SkillsUSA Brand Assets INTERNAL Official Brand Assets...

and selecting Kansas brings up:

where the most likely file is one of the .eps files, so we choose:

SkillsUSA KS Logo 2-c.eps

which may then be opened in a vector editor which will open .eps files such as Inkscape, or Serif Affinity Designer:

and we export as an SVG with appropriate settings:

which creates:

which opens in Carbide Create as expected:

One concern is the element at the top right:

Made up of a single vector it has self-intersections which are best avoided.

It’s a quick bit of work to redraw it in such a way that it is made up of discrete elements:

Basically just draw multiple elements:

which may be selected and then used with Trim Vectors:

Allowing one to break things up:

and which should afford one the lines with nodes at the correct places so that each parallelogram may be redrawn with the polyline tool:

Once one has a complete set it may be duplicated as needed:

and the underlying geometry deleted.

Attached as a v7 file.

SkillsUSA KS Logo.c2d (80 KB)

[Tod1d (Tod (with 1 'd'))]

@WillAdams

One concern is the element at the top right:

Did you try creating a toolpath before editing?

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

A long while ago, I learned that it isn’t worth my time to test geometries which aren’t well-formed — they’re like opinions and buttocks, only those which are well-formed should be shown in public.

A geometry which isn’t correctly made might work once, twice, a dozen, or even a hundred times, but inevitably it will fail at some point — when working on multi-million dollar printing projects I got in the habit of not depending on random chance and how a computer rounds a value — geometry needs to be such that the computer will reliably calculate how it will be processed when making a plate for printing, no matter which imagesetter resolution is used, no matter which RIP is used, no matter which PostScript/PDF version/implementation is used.

[Tod1d (Tod (with 1 'd'))]

I can dig that. I just tried it to see if it would work. If it works 90% of the time, I would likely keep trying it, and fix the 10% that didn’t work. Likewise, if it only works 10% of the time, I would adopt your strategy of just fixing it first.

In this case, the vectors self-intersect, but in a ‘neat’ way. When they are intersecting like in some of the poorly made fonts, or at shallow angles, experience dictates a failure. However, even in some of those cases it’s worth creating the toolpath and fixing the spots that fail.

In a QR code I did, there were many squares that intersected at corners. i.e. their corner points were coincident. Yet only a small percentage caused a toolpath failure, so I only fixed those that failed, and moved the corner points about 0.001" apart.