An often overlooked idea for easy CNC designs is sports SVG logos. They are free to download and offer many ways to use CNC machining.
Our Source For Free SVG Sports Logos
The website I'm reviewing is SportsLogoSVG.com. It's an accessible site to navigate. You can search for your team or click on one of the league menu options. They have logo downloads for NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL.
They offer downloads in SVG or PNG formats. All files are for personal use only. They sell some premium files for download, but I could find only eight of them. And they are very reasonably priced.
SportsLogoSVG does provide a tutorial for using their SVG files with a Cricut machine. But since they are SVG vector files, you can also easily use them with CNC CAD/CAM software.
I decided on two sports logos to download and try out in my copy of Vectric Aspire CNC CAD/CAM software.
Free Chicago Bears Logo SVG
The first logo I downloaded was for theChicago Bears.
The download process was easy. Just click on the big, black Chicago Bears Logo SVG button, and the site prompts you where to save the file.
I next created a new file using Vectric Aspire and imported the Chicago Bears SVG file.
I enabled the vector node editor, and it looked clean. I did not see any excess node points.
My final quality check was to use the Vector Validator function. Much to my surprise, it found 465 overlaps and 535 intersections. This many errors could have been better.
I tried zooming in on a small logo section to see if the problem was obvious. But unfortunately, I did not see anything.
I closed the vector validator and tried the Vectric function to select all duplicate vectors.
This function found the potential problem. You can see the purple or magenta colored vectors on the inner portion of the logo. This color indicates that the Vectric software did find duplicate vectors.
Since the duplicated vectors are the only ones selected right now, I need to press the delete key to remove them.
After I did this and retried the vector validator, they now look perfect. I saw no more issues with the vectors.
The final step is to create the tool paths. I kept it simple once again, and I used the 60-degree V-bit. For the outside black ring, I left the Flat Depth option unchecked. I also used an eighth-inch clearance tool.
With the inner ring, I used the same bits; only I set the flat depth to .125 inches.
I ran the simulator for all the tool paths, which was very nice.
A Sports SVG For The National Hockey League
The second logo I chose was the National Hockey League.
It was just as easy to download as the Chicago Bears logo. So I created a new file in Vectric Aspire and imported the logo vectors.
The node points in the node editor looked very clean.
The Vector Validator revealed similar issues as the Chicago Bears logo. Again, there were 465 overlaps and 535 intersections.
So I once again used the select duplicate vectors function. Again, I saw the familiar purple or magenta colors, indicating that there were duplicate vectors.
After deleting the duplicate vectors, the vector validator checked out fine.
The final step is to create the tool paths. For the logo itself, I would use the 60-degree v-bit. I left the flat-depth option unchecked.
I then decided also to cut the logo out. So I selected one of the outer vectors and created a profile tool path. For this tool path, I used a quarter-inch endmill bit.
I changed my V-Carve tool path to a light grey for the final look. I also changed the color of the material to black.
Finally, I ran both tool paths in the Vectric simulator, and the result was excellent.
Both sports SVG logos turned out very nice. I purposely avoided the logos where the different parts of the drawing overlapped. This vector overlap takes more time in CNC CAD/CAM software to properly create the tool paths.
To do this in Vectric quite often, you need duplicated vectors to create the tool paths properly.
This review aimed to see if the quality of the drawings was good enough to use on a CNC Router. I believe they are.
VCarve Pro Download Files
Reminder
You must verify all tool path settings, especially the bit settings, to ensure they are compatible with your CNC machine. Every CNC machine operates differently!
