Planning on building a cnc for the dremel, kinda like this http://hacknmod.com/hack/build-your-own-diy-cnc-milling-machine/
very surprised dremel hasnt done this already, they may now that they are dong a 3d printer…
Mark Dashnaw said:
Funny thing about this printer is - I am going to 3d print the pen holder that will fit into this to make it into a plotter as well as a vinyl cutter, the pen adapter is like $10 from Silhouette + shipping, i can print them for pennies
Ive read a couple posts about the cameo that say that smaller markers fit right into the cutter holder. So far nothing I have around here are quite right, but the idea is neat.
Bob when your ready for your next order remind me and I’ll include one of these for ya
I bought one of these machines about a year ago. Actually it’s a silhouette portrait not a cameo but I think the only meaningful difference is that the portrait will only run stock 8 inches wide instead of 12.
Since then I haven’t been able to make as much time to play with it as I wanted but I have learnt a few things. Most of the styrene sheet work for my entry into the 2015 challenge has been done on, or at least with the help of, the silhouette. I wouldn’t have considered trying to build a loco in a month of spare time without it.
It will cut very thin material right through, certainly 5 thou and maybe 10 if you really work the blade hard and get the settings just right. I use it more as a kind of more accurate score and snap system.
If you don’t use a cutting mat the machine will take 40 thou stock most of the time and 30 thou if it’s feeling awkward. 40 seems to be right at the upper limit - at least when its loading it’s very sensitive to any sort of variations in material thickness and you’re already outside the published envelope so there’s no leeway left. So i use 40 if it’s really necessary, otherwise I’ve got a small ocean of 30 thou pre cut in 8-1/2inch strips.
So I draw up what I want in CAD - just because that happens be convenient for me, other drawing programs seem to work just as well, it depends what you’re familiar with, and then port it across to the machine and have it run the file while I go and do something interesting. Or something that SWMBO is under the impression is more inportant.
Once the machine has finished I then go over all the score lines again with a craft knife, sometimes multiple passes. Delicate sections I cut right through, the rest I score deep enough to snap and then clean up the edges. The end result is at least as good and way quicker than measuring out and marking up by hand.
The usual rules apply as they do with any other machinery or technique. There are things it does really well, things where you have to think your way round the limitations - not usually of the machine but more likely of the scoring and snapping out process - and things that are beyond its capabilities.
On the truck frames for example it was a great tool to make sure I got 4 sets of essentially identical parts, and some of the long straight lines snapped out with almost no work, but I had to do a lot more hand cutting on some of the finer detail and sharper angles, and there was no point in even trying to cut the large circles - I marked centres and used a drill. An the frames were designed around multiple laminations of 40thou - if I wasn’t using the silhouette, fewer thicknesses of 80thou might have been better but would be grim to cut by hand.
In all this you also need remember that the knife is trailing behind the head, free to rotate and only held in line by the drag of plowing through the styrene. Corners do get slightly rounded and the overall path won’t be exactly as drawn. You can programme single thou accuracy with pixels all day, but you won’t get it once it’s snapped out.
These comments only really apply to the silouette and similar lightweight cutters - there are heavier cutters about, I know the silver bullet is one, which can cut thicker material and/or are more like mills in their behaviour.
There’s a long thread on the rmweb site which is worth a look at for anyone who’s got or or considering a silhouette.
Hope that’s useful to someone, and if not, please ignore what I’ve just realised is quite an old thread.
J.
Ive been experimenting with mine a bit more. Ive made some stencils for a game board Im making.
I set the cutter speed to half of whatever it tells me to set it at, and I get MUCH better results. I want to make a couple stencils for the lettering on the colliery at Majestic. I think Im confident enough to do it.
A year in, I’ve just twigged something blindingly obvious that’s going to make life a bit easier.
As I mentioned above, I basically used the Silhouette to score styrene nice and accurately - I don’t bother with more than double passes offered as standard, I take a scapel/craft knife to the score lines and either deepen them for snapping/folding or cut right though for complicated areas. Since most of my free time is after dark for more than half the year, seeing the silouette lines against shiny white styrene can be a right pain under artificial light. It both slows things up and is probably the biggest cause of scrap parts.
But, if you run a wash of diluted ink over all the lines and the wipe it off again, it settle nicely in all the score lines, making them visible. And if you use washable ink, guess what, you can wash it off when you’re done with it. I almost never use ink - rattle cans are the medium of choice round here - and I honestly didn’t think of this one until I did it by accident with a weathering wash on a piece of scrap I was using to protect the table.
Obviously this only works if you’re using a waterproof medium like styrene, and maybe everyone else had thought of it already, but just on case…
Pic shows the difference even in good light, ink being on the right. Ink itself is mid brown (a GW citadel colour), probably at a 10-20% density. But I guess anything that you can will work just fine.
Bob, can you tell us any more about that board game? Looks like a neat piece of modelling in its own right.
J.
Jonathan J said:
Most of the styrene sheet work for my entry into the 2015 challenge has been done on, or at least with the help of, the silhouette. I wouldn’t have considered trying to build a loco in a month of spare time without it.
This makes much more sense now. I was just thinking you were completely industrious and very very patient. Neat machine. Looks like fun.
Randy Lehrian Jr. said:
Jonathan J said:
Most of the styrene sheet work for my entry into the 2015 challenge has been done on, or at least with the help of, the silhouette. I wouldn’t have considered trying to build a loco in a month of spare time without it.
This makes much more sense now. I was just thinking you were completely industrious and very very patient. Neat machine. Looks like fun.
No kidding Randy, we caught him. I wanted one of these for vinyl lettering. But knowing it will cut/score styrene will probably seal the deal. I just have to learn how to use a drawing program. This will come in handy for the coach project coming up. Dang it.
Devon Sinsley said:
Randy Lehrian Jr. said:
Jonathan J said:
Most of the styrene sheet work for my entry into the 2015 challenge has been done on, or at least with the help of, the silhouette. I wouldn’t have considered trying to build a loco in a month of spare time without it.
This makes much more sense now. I was just thinking you were completely industrious and very very patient. Neat machine. Looks like fun.
No kidding Randy, we caught him. I wanted one of these for vinyl lettering. But knowing it will cut/score styrene will probably seal the deal. I just have to learn how to use a drawing program. This will come in handy for the coach project coming up. Dang it.
Caught? HUH! You do realise I still had to draw the thing, think through how to build the structure up from laminations, draw that and actually cut out all the parts and stick them together, right?
For sale : Approx 2 square feet of 30 thou styrene, slightly second hand, may have impression of freelance GE electric parts on one side, but will probably sand out. Also, some small bloodstains from where previous owner slipped with knife.
J.
PS : but they’re good little machines - if you’re going for one of the silhouette type rather than a heavier more expensive one, I’d say spend the extra and get the cameo - I can work round the the reduced feedstock width of the portrait most of the time. but it was a false economy. As I understand it, one advantage of the cameo is that it can - within reason - use feedstock of any width up to 12 inch, whereas you have to give the portrait 8-1/2" or so. It’s probably OK in the smaller scales, but if you got some long component more than 100mm/4in wide - say a coach side - you can’t put two next to each other, and if you haven’t got smaller bits to fill the space with, that’s a lot of wasted material.
Jonathan J said:
For sale : Approx 2 square feet of 30 thou styrene, slightly second hand, may have impression of freelance GE electric parts on one side, but will probably sand out. Also, some small bloodstains from where previous owner slipped with knife.
I accused a 3D printer guy of cheating also, boy was that a mistake. He made very much the same arguments you have made and truth is I think it takes as much or more talent to visualize draw and then send to the printer/cutter than it does to just make the part. Over at MLS there is a guy building almost an entire loco via 3D printer and he will tell you I am getting mine done faster. Lots of work getting it right.
Devon Sinsley said:
Jonathan J said:
For sale : Approx 2 square feet of 30 thou styrene, slightly second hand, may have impression of freelance GE electric parts on one side, but will probably sand out. Also, some small bloodstains from where previous owner slipped with knife.
I accused a 3D printer guy of cheating also, boy was that a mistake. He made very much the same arguments you have made and truth is I think it takes as much or more talent to visualize draw and then send to the printer/cutter than it does to just make the part. Over at MLS there is a guy building almost an entire loco via 3D printer and he will tell you I am getting mine done faster. Lots of work getting it right.
I don’t think it even comes down to more/less talent, just different ones. I’m an engineer by trade and after an initial scribble I do most of my sketching on graph paper - I find I get a more plausible model that way. But I know cutting out a row of consistent windows by hand is beyond me, without help from some kind of machine I’d spend months getting one coach side good enough to use and months more making its mirror image.
If there’s a line, where is it? Routing or scoring the piece out is ‘wrong’, sticking on a copy of the drawing is questionable if it was CAD generated, but doing it by eye is OK? But don’t build in cardboard, that’s not kosher 'cause it’s old fashioned. What about those so lazy they don’t even mine the iron ore to make their own knife blades from?
So I leverage - horrible word - the skills I have to cover as much ground as possible and buy tools that help me work around the skills I don’t have. And along the way I’m gently adding to the combined repertoire of things I can use/make to get models I want that either aren’t available or are simply beyond my means.
I wasn’t totally joking about the iron ore either - I met a guy a while back who thought nothing of making his own motor and gears literally from scrap materials - this was O gauge - but bought in (fairly poor) white metal castings to add to the handcut sheet metal of his locos. Naturally he only works from original works drawings, does all calculations by hand and the vehicle suspension operates in prototypical manner with scale travel and handmade leaf and coils springs wherever appropriate.
Where does he fit? It wasn’t a competition but is he cheating on some level - not really scratchbuilding - by buying in components he’s uncomfortable making? Or going beyond the call in making parts almost everyone else would automatically buy in? Or just enjoying the hobby and keeping it relaxing by concentrating on the bits he enjoys and not going too far outside his comfort zone?
Am I cheating? Honestly don’t think so. If someone was going to object - and I actually thought they might - I imagined it would be over the $50 motor block I used that might not have a twin in everyone else’s scrapbox - MIK almost certainly wouldn’t have had one lying about, any working motor blocks he owned would have been under something, running. It’s all down to perception I guess.
J.
PS : Sorry for the thread drift, but it seemed the best place to reply.
OK I took my tongue lashing…(http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-wink.gif). I hope it was understood that my cheating comment was meant tongue in cheek, I meant it in jest. I agree whole heartedly. I didn’t at one time but I certainly do now. I actually think this is a great idea. As such I will bring it back on topic.
Since it will cut styrene what file format can you feed it? I have to make a whole bunch of repetative parts for the coach seats, the patterns are in PDF but I can capture them as a jpeg. Will it handle jpegs or what options would a person have. That even goes for the vinyl as well.
Devon Sinsley said:
OK I took my tongue lashing…(http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-wink.gif). I hope it was understood that my cheating comment was meant tongue in cheek, I meant it in jest. I agree whole heartedly. I didn’t at one time but I certainly do now. I actually think this is a great idea. As such I will bring it back on topic.
Since it will cut styrene what file format can you feed it? I have to make a whole bunch of repetative parts for the coach seats, the patterns are in PDF but I can capture them as a jpeg. Will it handle jpegs or what options would a person have. That even goes for the vinyl as well.
No worries, no offence taken, and no tongue lashing intended from this end either.
On the file format front I should point out that I deliberately use v2.9something of the silhouette software, not the latest v3.1something. That’s because V3 had a known bug that stopped it running designs more than 24inches long, which can be a distinct limitation in large scale. They might have fixed that now, I haven’t looked. Apparently V3 otherwise is much improved and more flexible, but since I only use it to convert allready laid out CAD files the lack of functionality doesn’t bother me. The version I use also has some bugs relating to file conversion, but I’ve got work arounds for those.
So, on V2.9…
Won’t take pdf. I tested it by making a pdf directly from my CAD files and it can’t open it. Nada.
I haven’t tried it, but it will import bitmap, jpg, gif and a couple of other picture formats. As I understand it the general idea is that you use these as templates to draw a cutting layer using the various shape tools provided - there may also be a facility to follow the edges on line art or high contrast images, I’m not sure.
There is a tutorial in the rmWeb thread I linked to, making a hut (I think) starting from photos and laying over lines in silhouette to make the cutting file. I haven’t tried if because it wasn’t of interest/use to me a technique, I already had the CAD, but it seems to have been well regarded. If you’re prepared to wade through the thread, there’s also discussion of various bolt conversion programmes that allow image data to be imported from other sources - coreldraw, photoshop, etc.
As far as I’m aware there’s no distinction in import file formats for styrene/card/vinyl/whatever - you’re making a vector file to tell the head how to move, and from that point of view what you’re cutting or drawing on is immaterial.
J.
dragging to life an old thread. I was intrigued before about these machines. I have thought of another possible use and am seeking opinions. While we have talked about using them to cut vinyl decals what about the reverse and using them to cut stencils that then could be used as masking for painting on lettering and such?
Never mind I guess i missed the two posts that talked about making stencils. Sorry
Anyone have any experience with the curio? Sounds cool it does stippling and embossing. I am thinking ribbing and rivet detail ect.