Silhouette Cutter - an overview of what it is, how it works and what it can do for Railway Modelling

RobPulham

Following from an inquiry on my Silhouette Workbench by Phil Rossignol

Rossignol21416 said:

Rob,

• How does it work?
• What are its limitations?
• Who makes it?
• What are the costs - both capital and operational?

A thread, possibly in 'Hints and Tips' might be the place…

I have two sizes of cutting mat which I use for different things - 300 x 600 and 300 x 300. I use the smaller matt for cutting details and the longer one for van and coach sides.

Replacements are around £18 for the longer ones and £12 for a pair of smaller ones depending where and when you buy them. How long they last depends' on how much you use them. I got a couple of years from my first two mats but found that the stickiness wore off the small one and I had to resort to using pieces of masking tape to hold the styrene sheet in place. Eventually the edges of the mat wear out and it will no longer retain the registration and the mat wanders while cutting ruining the cut.

The cutters come with a piece of free software - Silhouette Studio which is used to control the cut and you can draw with it but I find it a bit clunky. Anyone who is proficient using a CAD package will find it easy to draw for cutting but if using a CAD package you need to save it as quite an old version of DXF to import it into Silhouette Studio.

I must confess that despite working in IT, I have never managed to grasp CAD packages so I was really quite pleased when I read about people using Inkscape which is more akin to Corel Draw than traditional CAD and I found it easy to pick up and work with. The bonus is that it too is free. - https://inkscape.org/ What I did do (or rather my good lady did), was to buy the upgrade to Silhouette Studio which is the Designer Edition (approx £25). This allows the native Inkscape.svg files to be opened directly in Silhouette Studio without having to save into a different format for import and cut.

How it works is that the cutting mat moves in one direction and the carriage that holds the blade moves in the opposite axis and the blade is free to rotate in the direction of travel so a combination of movement by the cutting mat and carriage allows circles to be cut. The simplest way to describe it is to imagine an inkjet printer with a blade instead of a print head.

The key thing to remember is that the blade cuts by being dragged across the surface of the styrene, it doesn't spin in the manner of a milling cutter.

It's limitations are that it will only cut through 10 thou (0.25mm) but you can score and snap 20 thou (0.5mm) it won't take anything thicker. I am led to understand that you can cut through 15 thou bt I haven't been able to buy any 15 thou in 300 x 600 sheets to try it.

I buy my styrene sheets from EMA models - I have no connection to them other than as a satisfied customer. The main reason that I buy from them is the sheet size that they sell fits the cutter directly. Whereas other suppliers tend to sell sheets in standard format A4/A3 sizes etc. Which would mean cutting them to size before use and potential wastage. In reality once you get the hand of it you can actually make use of quite small off cuts as long as you make sure that you position both the drawing and the offcut in the same position on the cutting mat.

Sheets of HIPS from EMA are currently £1.20 for 0.25mm and £1.40 for 0.5mm - size 305mm x 660mm. The downside is the postage which due to the size of the parcel isn't cheap but doesn't tend to go up too much the more you buy so I tend to order £50/£60 worth at a time to make postage more cost effective. - I seem to recall it was £6.95 for my last parcel of £60 worth of sheet and Plastruct.

I use DLimonene bought by the litre from eBAY to stick up my layers of styrene together having found Mek etc. a bit aggressive on the thinner sheet to the point of melting it. Limonene takes a bit longer to set and I usually place my layered up sections between two sheets of toughened glass (shelves from an old fridge are ideal) for a minimum of a couple of hours but overnight is better if you can.

You are to a degree only limited by your imagination and the ability to translate what you want into layers to build up either strength or levels of detail.

For example I tend to build up wagon or coach/van sides from 3 layers of 0.5mm them add details such as hinges, washer plates etc. cut from 0.25mm

So far I have made with the aid of the cutter parts for:

• Open wagons
• Covered Vans
• CCT's
• Small details such as label clips and RCH registration plates and of course the coach sides that I am just experimenting with.

To give an idea of what Silhouette Studio looks like when cutting - the colours are all the different lines that are being cut and are controllable both in the order that they cut and whether you actually cut them at all.

For example the green and blue lines that you see unchecked were lines that were scored onto the outer layer to create panel lines but are not required for the inner layers which I am cutting at present.

DavidL

Rob, thank you for a most informative post. It might be helpful to see a picture or three of the cutter. In particular, what do the blades look like, and how long do they last? Also, I know you have posted plenty of pictures of things you have produced using the cutter, but some pictures of raw cut sheets and finished products would make this thread much more useful for posterity.

RobPulham Thanks for the suggestions David.

The raw sheets are not the easiest things in the world to take photos of being white styrene but I will see what I can do.

First the matter of blades,

There are 2 types that fit the Cameo/Portrait/Curio the standard ratchet blade and a supposedly Premium Blade - I will explain the supposedly comment below*.

The first two images are of the standard blade that comes with the machine. I am still using the blade that came with it 3 years later but I do my cutting in stages starting with no1 on the graduation and building up to 10 with multiple passes and at the same time increasing the cutting pressure (a setting within the software).

I am aware of users on RMweb who have worn a blade out in 3 months - this type of blade is around £10/£11

Next is the Premium Blade, these are around £15 each and are supposed to last a lot longer than the standard blade. *I have to say that I have one of each and even though the Premium blade has had little use, I find that it doesn't cut as cleanly as my 3 year old standard blade

cbrailways Hi Rob. First question(s) please. How long does it take to cut the sheet you have shown and can you go away and leave the machine to do its job, or do you need to keep a watchful eye on it?

RobPulham Hi Chris,

About 3 hours or so all told but to be honest there isn't much detail cutting on this sheet, some take much longer - it's very easy to be tempted to fill the full sheet but it only takes longer to cut….I learned that the hard way.

The longest session I have had was 7am to 3am the following morning. I didn't do that again!

Wrigley12252

Mike Trice has written much on the techniques on RMWeb:

This link should lead into the series of articles. https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/114528-using-inkscape-to-produce-cutting-files-a-worked-example/&tab=comments#comment-2419948

Charlie

RobPulham Just to round this thread off with some examples of models created with the Silhouette as requested by David.

Earlier in this thread I posted an NER Implement Wagon that I had built. I have now finished it.