About a year ago we had a discussion in this forum about Cricut machines, but I missed out on a sale, and they were gone when I went to buy one. I lucked out in this year’s after Christmas sale, and got one today- great price, a few bucks over a hundred bucks, at Menards.
Turns out my daughter has one, as does a member of one of my model clubs, so they can teach me the ropes.
Nice! I’ll be looking forward to seeing what you can do with it.
–Chris
What’s a Cricut? A stencil cutting machine?
Kind of. Appliques may be another term, but my original intent was stencils for painting. It is used by scrapbookers and others, to create designs for adorning scrapbooks and such. It is basically a CNC vinyl cutter. But, it turns out, it can cut many things other than vinyl. Turns out it can cut card stock and even thin wood. When I heard that, I bought mine at the first sale price I could find.
I intend to cut thin wood, cardstock, and I will try cutting thin styrene sheet. I will also make some resolution test patterns to see how fine a pattern it will cut.
I believe the original machine was intended to be used with shape files offered by the company. But then they extended the utility by allowing you to upload your own graphics files. The slicing or g-code is done on line. You upload your design to their web site, and their utility converts that to the cutting/printing code (don’t know if it is a standard g-code or not- that info may be proprietary). I use a lot of card stock in my modeling, and the ability to cut and to draw/color patterns on the stock at the same time sure sounds handy.
Now I am trying to learn the ropes on drawing the graphics so that they will be properly converted to cutting code. It is pretty flexible on the graphics file types. In addition to jpeg and png, it will accept many other file types.
Mr. Stauffer,
I never thought of using a Cricut in the modeling application. As you noted, it was intended for scrap booking when it first came out and it cost upwards of two to three hundred dollars depending on the patterns dies purchased. These were the first generation Cricuts.
Please share with us your application of the Cricut in the modeling community in a WIP/Tutorial I am extremely intrigued by this whole concept of the Cricut cutting sheet styrene and or card stock. Thank you in advance!
Toshi
I agree with Toshi, please keep us posted on your results!
I set it up in my den, which had not a square inch of space left! So I am having to clean up the den. Actually have an area of the desk cleaned off to place it on. I could run machine now, but rest of den is a total mess, and really need to finish cleaning up before playing with machine.
I did temporarily to make their demonstration object, a thank-you card (from Cricut, thanking me for buying the machine). That object is from card stock and has both printing, and cut-out letters on it. This thing does take some desk footprint- it is 22 inches wide!
The manual is a 330 page pdf document! Most of that is for for designing your own patterns/designs, which is what I intend to do, and how to upload artwork into on-line cutting software. So reading that document is taking some time!
My original idea was making painting masks, but after hearing of how it can cut thicker stuff, I am hoping to do stuff similar to PE, but cut from card stock. I often use card stock in scratchbuilt models, so that seems like a reasonable idea.
Our vendors use vinyl die cutters that run on proprietary software vector files.
We export our art as .ai files and they convert it.
Many years ago I was permanently 86’ed from the Computer Center at Poly. I was building a model of a building that had a large quantity of perforated sun shades, so I wrote a program that punched every hole in a deck of IBM cards.
When I ran it through it jammmed the machine, caused a big ruckus and got me tossed.
A hobby friends’ Mrs has one for card making… pretty good,
I’ve forwarded a few ideas for to practice with, but nowt so far… [:P]
I treasure my box of IBM punch cards. After my own stash ran out, I posted a plea for more on rec.models.scale, and a guy sent me a five pound box (I paid postage). Thin but strong card stock with a plastic coating that primes very well. Great for gun shields and such. Many were only punched in first five or ten columns.
I can definitely see an open source modeling community popping up around the Cricut…similar stuff is happening with 3D Printing and scale modeling.
They are on sale at Menards for $129. $100 dollars off in the form of a rebate. If anyone is interested.
Yep, that is why and where I got mine.
Got my first design ready- bridge wing supports for WW1 destroyer. Be busy next week getting ready for Hope It Don’t snow (looks like it will), so will not try to upload and cut for a week or so.
Looked into this several years ago and now you have raised my interest in it again. . Hope it works out for you. Please keep us posted.