Well the Black Friday deal finally pushed me over the edge to buy the Shapeoko XXL. I had been looking for about 6 months and had decided on the Shapeoko after seeing posts by a user in the Festool forum about using it. So free shipping and free router made it all the easier! Thanks guys!
Anyway I want to preface this with the fact that I’m comfortable using technology, software and a host of tools (woodworking is a hobby and I run a home integration company programming home automation and such) design software is above my pay grade. I understand CAD to the basics of removing layers and such and dealing with blueprints to look at electrical plans and modify them. The things I see everyone doing here puts me in complete awe.
So the reason for the post:
I have been playing with it for 2 days making a lot of sawdust and testing things out, and enjoying it immensely by the way! But now I want to use the machine to cut my company logo into some different materials and I’m having trouble.
I already had an EPS of the logo and found some other posts and such recommending inkspace as a free software to easily convert the file to an svg or dxf file, or trace a bitmap to make a file to bring into carbide create.
I do like how carbide create is a software that even a newb like myself can actually get a design done and start cutting right away (I started cutting letters out of walnut to give to my 4 year old son and he loves watching the machine work!)
I opened the logo file in inkspace and then saved it as both an svg and a dxf but when I bring them into carbide create it gives me an outline. I saw a posting by someone else saying change the view to outline and make sure everything is fine. Unfortunately it isn’t fine so to speak. The lettering in the logo as an outline is fine however the logo portion is just a line and not a full outline of the curves and the house. How do I get the full drawing as it appears in the first picture (which is the normal view) as an outline just like the name? I’m trying to avoid redrawing the logo portion as I honestly spent the past hour playing with inkspace to try and figure out how to do this to no avail! Hence my earlier comment about design and CAD software is completely foreign to me!
I appreciate any help as I am hoping there are some steps I can take to get the first image to actually appear in carbide create. I am planning to download fusion360 at some point when I get the permanent machine to setup in the shop and I know that is going to be ridiculously daunting for me and is probably not something I’m going to be able to use realistically for months on end.
You will need to expand the parentheses strokes to outlines. How this is done varies depending on the software one is using (and the version).
Freehand:
Modify | Alter Path | Expand Stroke — set options to match the selected stroke, press OK
Inkscape:
Path | Stroke to Path
Adobe Illustrator (this is from memory):
Object | Expand — check “Stroke” in the dialog box, press OK
Then, you’ll need to choose how you’re going to do CAM — are you going to just mill out flat bottomed pockets? If so, the narrowest feature needs to be ~10% larger than the endmill which you’ll be using. Alternately, just use the nifty new V-carving feature in Carbide Create — this design is straight-forward enough that one should be able to just select the paths and choose that Toolpath option.
You are a GENIUS! Thank you so much (of course I know your genius comes from experience but thanks none the less!). That was so simple yet there are so many things to be done in the software that I was a bit overwhelmed. I even spent an hour or so reading through the entire Inkscape user guide to try and understand things better and i think that confused me more.
Now this brings up another few questions. When I do this the house portion of the logo shows as dashes and then some of the lines in the lettering is missing. See pic below. I have managed to do something to fix the t in the logo but not all of it and I am honestly not exactly sure how I got it to work.
I just want to make sure the toolpath will come out clean on the house. On the letters I can also draw in the lines using carbide create but it doesn’t seem as clean.
Once I bring it into Carbide create though it doesnt seem to let me create the proper tool paths. I can do an outside tool path if I want and it does the entire logo and all the o’s. If I choose a pocket it only does the o’s and this is when I select the entire image (all nodes).
Since I am at the inlaws for thanksgiving this was giving me something to occupy myself however it seems as though I may have to wait till I get home and can connect to the machine and run some tests while I tinker.
Basically I want to mill the logo clean through a 1U flat anodized blank rack panel. Then I was going to mill out the logo into 2 different pieces of acrylic to push through the logo and backlight it with LED’s. This would be for equipment racks we install on client site.
The V-carve could work as a groove finish with a smaller opening through the material might be cool and then I can put a piece of LED acrylic behind the entire panel instead of trying to make the material come flush to the front.
In Inkscape choose the Bezier curve tool (looks like a rapidograph) shift F6 — hover over an open point, click, then click on the other end of the path, which will close it — adjust/add off-curve points if need be.
