(No subject)

paper vs styrene

That door looks good.

You are looking at it close up.  If the viewer is 2-3 feet away, it will look fine.  In addition, if that door is installed in a well detailed building, the viewers probably won't even notice how square it is.  The savings in cost is probably worthwhile if you have a lot of doors to make.  Of course, the time factor might make the Grandt Line parts more attractive depending on how much time you have to make structures and how long it takes to make a door like that one.

My Goal

My goal is to be able to completely scratchbuild a structure from cardstock to show what can be done with the machine and a little ingenuity. The drawing is made so I can cut out and make a bunch of door parts very quickly. Looking at it in normal light and without major magnification, it does look pretty good. Passable for sure. I am also going to try it with styrene to see how that turns out. 

Force square cuts?

Greg - could you force square cuts by extending the lines of the openings slightly beyond on another? In drafting it was a stylized design method to make the objects stand out but may force the Cricut into lifting the blade instead of rounding the corners. 

Mine is still in the office in the nice little bag until I get the house painting finished that started between Christmas and New Years!

Thanks for posting. 

Neil

square cuts

Slowest Speed

I'm new to this and didn't know I could vary the speed. Any tips on how to do that? Both these suggestions will fuel me into next week I'm sure. 

cricut explore cutting speed

@Yaron

No problem. I did some searching and came up with the same thing. 

The more I look at the door, the more I like it. I am working on building the crossing shanty in the Feb MR out of cardstock. Just to see if it could be done and what kind of results I can get.

Back at it ...

@Greg:

Have you had any luck playing with the custom settings? I am struggling to get nice square cuts still and look for other's experiences. The FaceBook group has suggested less pressure and more passes so will try that tonight an post some tests. 

@Rene: Any advice?

Manual Overcuts

I have found that if I put my own over cuts in I get much squarer cuts on the Cricut Explore. 

So if I lay out my cuts like the square on the left, then the blade is not having to turn the corner and flip 90 degrees as it does for the square on the right. It also give the blade time to straighten out before it gets into the part of the cut your want to keep. Of course this method is not practical for interior cuts unless you have some way of hiding the over cut, say like the frame around the window casting.

Also if you use this method, make sure you lay out your lines in the same direction. I have found that the machine appears to honor the direction you layout a straight line. (I am using an older version of Autocad LT and exporting/importing as a DXF file.) So if I do all my horizontal lines from left to right, and all my verticals from top to bottom. Then the blade does not have to do much spinning. If I lay the top line out from right to left, then the bottom line out from left to right, the blade might have to make a 180 degree turn if the machine decides to cut the horizontal lines consecutively. I have found that making a 180 degree turn is nearly impossible if you plunge the blade into thick material.

Regards,

Kevin Jones

Overcut

Kevin:

That is an observation worth trying. It was suggested on the facebook forum but I was struggling with how to do this with SketchUp as the lines form a bounding edge and the vector basically stops and starts again beyond. AutoCad actually has a feature to add that extra line as well to make it look more "hand drawn" so I may have to go back to that. I use SketchUp PhotoMatch to overlay the building sides on an imported pic to get the basic shapes and features of the real structure and then scale it to a known dimension (this is way easier than trying to figure out the original POV). 

The other nice feature of SketchUp is a plugin called "Flattery" which unfolds the 3-D building to flat faces for cutting. Windows, however, are my  nemesis since it is desirable to have the frames recessed from the wall. A .tiff or .jpg image can be output to a very high resolution and the cuts get better (see my low-res test below) but I fear I have a lemon. I'll have to try using an overcut coupled with light passes to see what happens. 

Left is a paper test at 72 dpi and right is the same material at 300 dpi. I have calibrated the blade since but not retried this piece. Why it doesn't cut square to the other lines is very odd. Is it a lemon?

Cutters like the Cricut use a

Cutters like the Cricut use a SWIVELING blade as the cutter.  In order to make a corner cut it needs to make some lateral movements.  Examine your left hand paper example and closely look at the four corners, they have what looks like dimples in the corners.  That is where the knife has to turn itself in order to make the next angle cut.  That is why an overcut four seperate passes might give you better results.

Making a cut that started life as an image will never give great results.  Cutters like the Cricut need to be worked by using VECTORS.  The machine goes to point A, puts the blade down, goes to point B, raise the blade.  A good clean cut.  The conversion of a bit map (jpg, tiff, etc) gives tons of little vectors or gets interpreted as a curve.

For your model windows purposes I would not use a scanned or converted image.  I would redraw exactly what I wanted but using the overcut methods previously explained.  One other point is that the hold down technology for the Cricut does allow for SOME minor material movement, another reason to go with the over cut methodology.

My 2 cents, please spend widely!    Russ

Use separate layers instead of overcuts?

Earlier in this thread, someone suggested that if you put lines in separate layers, you might resolve this rounded corner problem.  The assumption is that the Cricut cuts all the lines in one layer before it positions the knife to cut lines in another layer.

Has anyone tried this, and does it work?  It would seem that this technique might produce sharp 90 degree corners without needing to use over cuts.  You'd put the two opposite parallel sides of a rectangle in one layer and the other two parallel sides that are 90 deg from the first pair in another layer.  The knife would lift at the end of each line segment.

I have not tried my Cricut yet, but when I do, I will try to answer this question myself if no one else has by then.  Lots of grandkids in the house, so this may not happen too soon .

Dennis

Use separate layers instead of overcuts?

Earlier in this thread, someone suggested that if you put lines in separate layers, you might resolve this rounded corner problem.  The assumption is that the Cricut cuts all the lines in one layer before it positions the knife to cut lines in another layer.

Has anyone tried this, and does it work?  It would seem that this technique might produce sharp 90 degree corners without needing to use over cuts.  You'd put the two opposite parallel sides of a rectangle in one layer and the other two parallel sides that are 90 deg from the first pair in another layer.  The knife would lift at the end of each line segment.

I have not tried my Cricut yet, but when I do, I will try to answer this question myself if no one else has by then.  Lots of grandkids in the house, so this may not happen too soon .

Dennis

Checked your blade?

Have you tried using the

Have you tried using the shapes in design space? I have been making a number of small buildings with my machine. What I discovered is that if I import a drawing the program does a very poor job of keeping the edges true. I have a program called Model Builder that allows you to design and print buildings to various scale sizes. It basically uses resizable  rectangles of various bitmap images that you position to make a flat picture you print, cut out and glue together. 

What I have been doing with the Cricut is using design space to create the shapes to the same sizes as Model Builder and cutting out of styrene and the results are very good.

Good idea!

@dgolka (name?) - I had thought of this but was determined to "make it work" my way. Clearly another approach is necessary. Perhaps my design could simply be used to trace over in Design Space on a new layer. 

The holiday break has been discouraging as the weather has been pretty bad. I guess I have been discouraged with this but look forward to getting this to be a useful tool. 

Using design space

 Neil I did some experiments in design space especially using the slice tool. I made a rectangle to represent a 10 x 20 foot HO scale wall and cut a 3.5 ft square window opening in the wall this is 1/2 real size. Next I created the window frame starting with a square in design space @ 2" in size and used the slice tool to remove 4 equally spaced .8" squares. I had to do these one at a time. Once removed I resized it to .52" square and sent it cut out of .015" styrene.

Don

Slice tool?

That looks absolutely perfect. In HO non-the-less. What is the "Slice" Tool? I haven't seen that discussed. 

Doors

The door used separate cuts for each line still leave a bit of corner but you can use a file to clean up.

A dud?

Hi Neil,

Given Yaron's comments above, I would hazard that there is indeed something not turning freely in the knife area.  You should be able to get much better results than you're seeing without making overcuts.

Have you tried calling Cricut support?

Rene'

Dud ...

Thanks all. I'll give it one more try using some of the suggestions. Design space seems no worse than any other choice and I could actually trace my image right there on a separate layer. 

That said, I had not tried the support avenue as the examples everyone had provided, along with the amazing stuff produced by crafters online, it seemed as though I was trying to ask the cutter to do more than it is capable of by introducing SketchUp into the mix. Back to the basics and maybe, after all that, it will be deemed a dud. 

Frankly I could have built a dozen models while trying to make this work. The idea of using SketchUp PhotoMatch to draw a long gone building, flatten it, and print it to scale is still just too appealing to give up trying. 

Same problems

I have same problems with this new installed door. Look the small windows on upper half, the left window is a bit narrower and not absolutely right-angled.

I think about it, all layers of door as separate parts etching to make.