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A small addition to the earlier "tutorial", this time cutting plastic instead of vinyl. For my Lightning I needed to make two ventral fins from 30 thou plastic card. Accurate scale drawings were part of Echelon's instructions, so I scanned these: ....saved the scan to my photo album then dragged the image onto the Silhouette screen: the drawing again being scaled to a workable size. Then the fin was traced, the only slightly tricky bit (not really!) was the curve. When you click on the drawing tool icon, one of the options given is to draw a curve. Select this, click your mouse at the starting point then makes series of clicks following the curve till the end point. "Sign off" with a double click, then group with all the other elements. When you've finished the design and saved it, click the "SEND" button, top right and a drop down menu gives you a choice of materials - on my machine plastic card isn't one of them! So you have to tailor the cutting speed, the number of passes and the force. The maximum force is 33, I chose this, 10 passes and speed 5. The standard blade will cut 10 thou card but for anything thicker you need a heavy duty blade, I set it by eye so that a reasonable amount of blade was showing! Not very scientific I admit. When you load the cut mat and plastic sheet, the latter tends to move about because of the force and reduced "stickiness" of smooth plastic, so I just hold it lightly in place whilst cutting. The blade won't cut all the way through the plastic, but scores deeply enough that with a little bending the fin pops out. Then a sand, clean up and hey presto......! 😁 Wonderful machines these Silhouette cutters!

Hi all, Love my silhouette, the plotter, not me 🙂 Hope to update my knowledge about masks and share some files. Cheers. Richard

I tend to use AutoCAD (2005, not LT), quite frequently, and was wondering if my drawing files could be easily interpreted/converted by the various cutter software programs. Thanks a bunch,

Hi to all.....I'm Enrico from Italy.......i love 1\48 airplanes model.....I've a cameo portrait and try to use it more possible to replicate insignia,codes ,walkaway and canopy masks.....😉

Hi, Thanks for the invite. I administrate the facebook "cutting edge " plotter/cutter group dedicated to scale modeling and cutters. Kevin told me about this website a couple days ago. I think this website is a great thing especially for those using cricut machines. Now they have a place they can load files without the annoyance of facebook interfering. I really enjoy using cutters in scale modeling and look forward to seeing what comes out of this effort to put this one a website.

Thanks Kev and Brian. Start with 10 thou for some practice and experiment with the settings, ie speed, force and number of passes. You obviously won’t need a force of 33 so start with something like 15 and perhaps 2 passes. Speed isn’t that critical I’ve found. You may have seen I need to cut fins for the red top missiles from 10 thou, I’ve used it before but can’t recall the settings! May well do that tomorrow after my golf in which case I’ll report back.

Yes indeed Max, very handy! Will have to try my hand at this, as its one thing I have not yet tried w/my Silhouette.

That's awesome, Max! Kev

Welcome aboard, Enrico! Kev

See new section "cutting plastic"

Thanks. Yeah, Have used the silhouette Cameo 1 in the past but never have been successful in getting decent cuts with it. A few years ago Brother introduced the ScannCut CM550 in SA and my wife and I Decided to get one after seeing a demo at a local hobby expo. There is also a lot more support for Brother products than silhouette products currently in SA. For us it was the best move ever. Find it more user friendly than the Cameo 1 at that stage, and was getting much better cuts on vinyl and masking tape. We recently upgraded to newer Scanncut SDX1200(Sdx125 in the states) which is much better than the old CM550. My wife uses to cut vinyl as a small business for herself A nice feature I have used in the past is the scanning option build it in the cutter, Scan something and cut directly. Also a nice feature is that it can scan in the mat with your cutting material and you can place your cuts exactly where you want them. Brother has Canvas Workspace to design on the PC, But I went aftermarket and found Sure cuts a Lot(SCAL). A lot more user friendly than the brother software and it supports various cutters including silhouette. The only drawback for the Brother machines is that the cuts must be saved on a USB stick, or to cut send directly to the cutter via WIFI you must use Canvas workspace. With SCAL can most of the designs, but when I wanted to some very complicated I had to use Inkscape, save as a SVG and then import to SCAL. Earlier this year I found Affinity Designer and now replaced Inkscape with this software and doing most of my designs in there and then send to SCAL to finish up. SCAL is great for what my wife does on her side.

Thanks Brian, I tried to write it from my point of view when I was a beginner, I hope to works for people in that position!

One of the areas I'd like to explore here is the ability of the various software packages used in mask production to convert to other formats used by other packages. For example, are there converter utilities for the Sihouette Studio format, or even DXF? Can someone who uses a Cricut machine download one of Brian's files, and convert it to a Cricut-compatible format for use with their machine? What formats do the various software packages support natively? I think answering these and similar questions here in the forums could provide great value to the community. Eventually I'd like to establish an FAQ section, where modellers can get their common questions answered quickly and easily. Kev