Cutting plastic!

[Mozart]

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!

[Kevin Futter]

That's awesome, Max!

 

Kev

[Out2gtcha]

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. 

[Mozart]

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. 

[Mozart]

Just finished cutting the Red Top fins from 10 thou plastic card, here's the successful settings I used:

 

 

Fins just snap easily out of the plastic sheet.