I have cut out 3 so far and none of them slide together very easily. lots of sanding… am I missing something?
I did them in 1/8" Baltic Birch, using Proofgrade maple plywood settings. Those settings were really too hot for Baltic Birch so the cuts had a pretty wide kerf–much wider than you would get from Proofgrade maple. So my deer are actually a little loose in the joints.
The BB that I’ve used has been a lot thinner than the PG materials. Probably just needs a slight adjustment to the tabs or slots if you want to use PG materials. (Or you can sand it down.)
These were not made for PG material. The joints were based off BB plywood from my local lumber supply house. Fitment will vary.
That’s probably the issue. I have been using the maple. I have no clue what to make next!
Kerf adjustment is a bear sometimes.
This is my pair (standing male buck & grazing doe). I copied @m_raynsford’s technigue of putting arrows where the tiny (0.012") tabs (cut skips) are to make it easier to punch out the parts. The numbers show which pieces go together. It’s sized for PG Med Cherry Ply. The blue is a cut, as is the black square outline. Red is a score (fast) and Green is engrave (I use the Graphic setting). All settings are PG auto settings.
You shouldn’t need any glue. They are a tight fit. No slop.
If you notice the file name includes a percent factor - in this case 99pct. That’s because the original was for Maple which in my stock is a hair thicker than my Cherry. So I simply selected all of it, locked the dimensions and set the size to 99% so it reduced it just enough to tighten up all of the slots. It’s a quick way of switching between materials.
The kerf on my machine is 0.007"
Here’s the file:
Don’t worry about the black box - that’s because there’s an outline bounding box (the cut out for the flat-pack card). Discourse treats it as a solid. The SVG should download fine.
I would change the color on one of the hip sections and a leg and just cut those to see if any adjustment is needed. If so, go back and adjust the whole thing by the appropriate percentage scaling factor. It really doesn’t matter that the legs and deer bodies will come out a hair larger or smaller - you just want the slots to be tight.
BTW, I did add a nose (engrave), eye and smile 
but I haven’t cut that version so if the deer are malevolent looking maybe delete those parts and go back to the faceless version 
(I made an evil looking turkey that my wife really doesn’t like - 10" tall too. How was I to know turkeys don’t have teeth?)
EDIT: I added a version saved in Corel with a different styling sheet. I have not actually run this one through the GF though so no warranties that it will load or cut properly But it does show what the thing looks like. I traditionally don’t worry about the style sheet used on the file save as it’s only an issue with Discourse but Chris prevailed 
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I just finished cutting a set (second time)…draftboard…perfect tight fit. My grandson put them together himself. We both appreciated not having to glue them.
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You can avoid losing all the style information by exporting with anything other than “Internal CSS” selected.
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I don’t export from Corel - I File|Save As.
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Either way, it’s probably the same issue as with Illustrator, Discourse strips out embedded style sheets for security reasons. This page suggests that Corel has an equivalent option to use Presentation Attributes instead of a style sheet, which would allow you, if you wanted, to embed an SVG into a post here without having everything turn to a black fill.
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That looks fantastic. Thank you for including the file. I still can’t get over putting the antlers on backward. I didn’t use any glue so it was easy to fix them. 
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Mine fit together perfectly with Proofgrade walnut plywood. Not at all difficult to slot together but holds tight without glue.
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Thanks - these are beautiful, and a quick print.
As for making it parametric, I’d model these in Fusion360 as a sketch (which is 2D), with one parameter, material thickness, which I’d use to dimension the slots. Drawing in Fusion’s sketch mode is very similar in capabilities to drawing in Illustrator - pick a tool, draw with it. The main difference is that you can then dimension your drawing so you can precisely control relationships and sizes (e.g. exactly 30 degrees angle, exactly 1/8 inch gap). And you can load an SVG into a sketch, so you can use this design as a starting point. It
Illustrator has variables, but you can’t (as far as I can tell) use them to control much about the drawing, just substitute in strings, filenames for linked files, and graphs, but not resizing objects. Unless you want to write scripts, which is much more work than using Fusion360’s sketch tools.
For example, I imported your design into a sketch, set up a parameter ‘t’ for material thickness set to 1/8 inch, then deleted the slots in the design and drew slots with width t. If you change t, it changes all the slots.
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Fantastic!
Thanks for this file! I didn’t think about it at the time, but the other problem with Discourse stripping the styles is that you lose all of the colors. It would have been a lot more difficult to reconstruct everything from the solid black one as it would require finding all the paths and recoloring them, so I appreciate the second upload.
Not sure what all the brown dots and numbers are for, I’m cutting mine now and have just set those to ignore.
We’re doing our Thanksgiving a day late, and I’m looking forward to giving my guests a tour of the lab and letting them pick out some decorations to be cut to order.
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What a wonderful plan. Hope you have a Happy Day Late Thanksgiving!
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What show as brown dots & #s are the indicators as to what parts slot with whatever other parts. Since there are different legs for each deer it shows the legs, hips, antler base, etc that belong to each other. They’ll be hidden by the overlap on the slot. Match 1 with 1 and 2 with 2 etc.
The dots show because it’s a single stroke Hershey font with odd “fills” but they will score correctly.
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I’m trying to figure out what you are referring to here. Is that SVGs generated by certain programs and procedures?
Yeah. Pretty sure that the purple color on my gobbler svg is from the red and blue layers over in this thread.
There are a few different ways to apply styles (color, stroke, etc.) to elements in an SVG file. One of them is to include a CSS stylesheet. I think it’s the default for Illustrator and perhaps others. There’s nothing wrong with the file, but when you upload it here, Discourse rewrites it and strips out the entire style section. There is another thread around here, shouldn’t be too hard to find, with some further details, but it turns out this is done on purpose, for security reasons, so it’s not changing.
The default for an SVG element that doesn’t have a style applied is no stroke, black fill. That explains the weird things that happen sometimes where people upload SVGs here. The shapes will still be there but they’ll all be filled with black.
Avoiding this is a relatively simple matter of not using the embedded stylesheet option. I’m not allowed to make suggestions, but I use the one that rhymes with smesentation smattributes.
Discourse also strips out embedded images from SVGs, but AFAIK there is no workaround.
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