Vinyl Cutters

Have a curio and a cameo 2.

General:
- Get the silhouette tool kit or analog for cleaning.
- Pinterest is your friend, you will find a ton of tutorials and pages that will give you tricks and free svg to play with. favorite is "silhouette school"
- trace tool is your friend, but corel draw or illustrator are the best.
- get the busisness edition of silhouette studio.

Cutting
- buy a lot of blades, 3 weeks on constant use for regular, 3 months on premium ones.
- always test your cut with a pencil or pen on cardstock (use a penholder for that, sometimes the machine returns to 0,0 without lifting the tool, and can mess with your work.

Scoring on paper on a cameo
- use a dry silhouette pen
- use a pen holder and a scoring tool

Sketching on paper
- use the silhouette penholder, or the chromas' creations one.

>>544681
I bought a Silhouette Cameo last year and it has saved me approximately 10 Billion hours of manual cutting time.
The thing is a life saver.
I design papercrafts all the time and if you build papercraft often enough then this is a must have.
I'm not the most skilled in using it, I use quite a thick card stock for my papercraft so I have to set the blade to the deepest cut. I should look into working the finer details of the machine.
The way I work it now I just export my .pdo files to a .dxf file and open that in the Cameo's software, set the blade to 10, cut the edges and then set the blade to a 2 and cut the scoring lines.
The only problem I have with it is some times it will pause for a few minutes between cuts, but I'm not sure whats causing it.

>>544710
>~1 million years.
How old are you?

Also,
>having a machine do your hobby for you.
Folding and Pasting machine when?

>>544743
At least 1 million and 1 years old.

Folding and pasting machine! I like your thinking, I'll see what the RnD people can come up with.

>>544743
Well I'm mostly interested in the vinyl cutting, not the paper scoring or cutting so that's a relatively difficult hobby for someone who's not so great at using an exacto.

>>544762
Then maybe you should try your luck in a forum which focusses on vilyl cutting, and not papercraft...

Now this is a cutting and pasting paper with your silhouette machines thread

I recommend eBay or amazon, also look up signwarehouse and uscutter. Buy a vinyl cutter for as much as you can afford, they cut cardstock wonderfully, just have to learn the ins and outs of the machine and software. Illustrator or Inkscape are a must unless your cutting software is great, not usually the case Unless you have mutoh or Roland cutter or the like then you use flexi or whatever.
I operated a vinyl express q42 and sai flexi 8 at my last job.

>>544681
I have a silhouette portrait I bought mainly for vinyl cutting but also use for papercrafts etc. It's similar to the cameo (uses the same blades and software) but with a narrower width. I generally create dxf files in other software and import into the basic studio software fixing the scale afterwards. It works great for me and the blades last much longer cutting self adhesive vinyl than cardstock or photopaper. The print and cut feature also works quite well so long as you're willing to sacrifice a chunk of your page to registration marks.

>>545106
I could live with that. (Any similar thread I tried to start fizzled lol.)

>>545106

I use the cameo for papercraft exclusively. I score and cut with the cameo, allowing me to do lineless builds for my paper Gundams. Using a cameo is also a real time saver compared to manually scoring and cutting 50-70 pages per model.

I use the cameo via the illustrator connect plugin as it's much simpler workflow-wise. I can edit and print in illustrator and then send the cut lines over to the cutter software directly with a click of a button. Minor convenience like these adds up when you are cutting > 50 pages per model.

I would not spend money on anything but a Cricut Explore II. COMING OUT NOW!

>>545444
Got any pictures? I would love to see some of the paper gundam stuff.

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>>545571

Here's one that I finished 2 days back.

>>544681
I'm considering to buy their smaller model next month, Silhouette Portrait (won't be able to afford the Cameo this year, and I really want to get started).

Question is: is the Portrait capable of scoring instead of cutting? And do you need 2 runs for that, i.e. first score then dunno change pen to blade then cut - or how does that work? Can the plotter change the pressure applied for cutting/scoring "itself", or do you have to do that manually by changing the setting of the blade? (I've seen the blades have 10? settings, what does that even mean, I assume pressure)

>>546812
Yes, the Silhouette is capable of scoring, and on the same run if you are using the blade to score. The plotter can adjust the pressure of the blade on the fly, it is all based on the template you are printing from.

If you wish to score with a pen and cut on single run, then you need the Silhouette 3 because that can hold two devices. Personally, I find the Silhouette doesn't have enough pressure to score with a pen, but it is sensitive enough and more preferably to score with a blade.

The settings on the blade has little to do with the pressure. The pressure is handled by the software based on your template. The blade settings sets how much of the blade is exposed. At 1, it can barely cut through a thin sheet of paper. It's to help optimized your cutting guide to the material you are using as to not over cut.

>>545572
where do you get your paper? love your work btw

>>546830

The papers used are a mix. Metallic black/white/silver are from a local bookstore. Red/gray are ordered online from a China Taobao store as I can't find them in Singapore.

>>546829
Very good, and thanks for your answer - very much appreciated! I mentioned the pen because I've read somewhere that using an empty pen is best for scoring, personally I don't mind using the blade for it when that works good enough too, it's what I do manually anyways when working with cardstock.

And thanks for clearing up what the pen settings mean, I've checked out their website and various vendor sites and didn't find or didn't notice an explanation there.

Now as a last detail I'm curious about the maximum paper weight the Portrait can handle - the official website says "ca. 300gsm" which would be perfect for my needs, I'd like to be able to use 270gsm photo paper. The reviewers however claim the limit for clean cutting is more around 200gsm.

>>545572
>>546840
Great work, anon!

>>546843
I would agree with the reviewers saying the 200gsm cardstock is the most optimal cutting weight. You can get away with the 300gsm "as advertised" if the blade is brand new. The blade does get dulled easily over time (if cutting cardstock), and a moderately used blade can still cut 200gsm cleanly.

I've tried 255gsm photo paper, and while a new blade does wonderfully, after several usage, it has a lot of trouble. Especially since most photo paper has that extra film over the paper the blade seems to have trouble cutting through. You can have it cut twice in this case, but avoid very small and intricate cuts if you have to cut twice.

>>546844
I see. Well, 200gsm should be good enough for the time being. I've got plenty 160gsm paper to work with too, and it's cheaper anyways. Alright, guess I'll order the Silhouette later today.

File: 2016-11-09 17.39.02.jpg (1MB, 2592x1456px) Image search: [Google]

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>>546829
>>546844
Hi, it's me again (>>546845)

So... I got a Silhouette Portrait and finally had some time to play around with it for a while. Great value for the price, but my biggest problem currently is that even when I use the lowest settings for scoring (blade depth 1, pressure 1, speed default for vinyl iirc that's 4), it's still a bit too much for 160gsm paper and scores so strongly that the paper easily tears.

Is this just because the blade is brand new, or is the 160 paper too thin for scoring, or should I change the speed? (If changing speed, is faster better or slower? - what speed settings do you use for scoring?)

Here's one of my first results btw.

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>>547607

>>547608
Beautiful!

I run CNC vertical mills and lathes, and big Japanese CNC (shoda, etc) routers. Once I had to make a part from spongy 8mm urethane foam. It drove me nuts trying to cut it with endmills, so I made a holder for a razorblade. I can orient the spindle by every 0,1degree and lock it, but can only make many many short straight cuts with this tool. I've had a hellovah time doing soft materials before this, and had suggested that we needed to farm out these odd, rare parts to someone with a waterjet CNC machine. I've seen paper/foam/paper laminate boards cut with waterjet machine with zero tear-out but I'm thinking about adding an Arduino controlled solenoid to reciprocate the cutter.

What are the blades you guys use?
I Thought about making a swiveling holder that lets the point of the cutter lag behind tool center, but I can simply allow the spindle to orient before the cut, and then turn off the M19 spindle orient code, and let the path move the tool as needed.

I wonder what the lag distance is for paper cutting tools, and what cutters are used. I've simply been using box cutter blades and can cut up to 20mm thick rubber by making multiple passes.

I make tool holders for carbide inserts now and then for custom angles for big repeat jobs, which is faster than ball milling somebody's required stupid angles like 5,8 degrees or 60,5, when they simply do not want 6 or 60 degrees for which tools exist. So I'm sure I can make a holder for the little paper cutting tools. Some of our machine's travels are several thousand millimeters, 112x136" and I thought it would be cool to do some Tesselations of paper and frame them like a free standing screen.

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>>547622
It's just a simple fractal based on a design I saw somewhere, but thank you! Here is the cut and crease template, sadly can't post .svg or .dxf here, and I don't have a converter to .pdf. Actually it would be very cool if we were able to upload .svg to 4chan, too.

File: kirigami fractal.png (10KB, 708x1331px) Image search: [Google]

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>>547628
damn, that version had small errors which had fixed last week, but only in the dxf version... here's a better one

>>547607
Bit late so perhaps you figured this out already but you can set the blade to 0, treat it as 1 in the software. Works great for thin papers.

As an alternative, they also have embossing and stippling/etching heads (meant for the curio, but they work just as well on the other machines), or you can use an empty pen and the pen holder.

>>544681
i have the cameo 3, but with a fresh install the program freezes while loading, or it may finish loading and will freeze during work.. i have windows 7 and this shit is a giant white brick of shit at the moment.

>>547623
i think you'will have more info on /diy/