New Material Cutter

Looking at Matt's latest creations I can see that Matt and I have different styles. Whereas I see Matt's style as more 'pure' (unadulterated wooden craft parts, with added pieces of plastic and paper), mine uses more digital assets, unless I am making minimalist miniatures, like the little guys below.

It really started in 2010 when I started printing details onto paper using an inkjet printer, to save me from painting fine details that make up a Napoleonic British line infantryman.

In 2016, I bought a Cricut Explore 3, which is a desktop cutting machine. You feed it a drawing and rather than printing the design it cuts it out. I used for a lot of parts that I used to craft from wood, such as arms, legs, bicorne hats, plumes, axe blades, etc.

One day I was curious about whether my Cricut could cut a particular material and I found a page on the Cricut website showing all kinds of materials I did not know it could do. It could do 1/16" basswood!

Unfortunately, I was on a page showing what the latest model could do, not what my model could. Nonetheless I tried the custom settings it was recommending and, although it scored the wood pretty good, it did not cut it all the way through. The custom settings allow you to make multiple passes, but no more than nine. Running the job twice seemed risky as the material doesn't need much shifting in order to mess the second job up. No, the only thing to do was to retire my seven year old machine and buy the latest model!

By the way, if you have read my older stuff you know that I have a laser cutter, so why am I looking for a heavier cutting machine, you might ask? Well, the laser does not do well in the heat and the building where the laser is housed has no air conditioning. Oh, and I live in Arizona. I cannot bring the laser into an air conditioned house because of all the smoke generated by the cutting, so…

So, I bought the new Cricut Maker 3 from Amazon (that is an affiliate link; won't cost you anything more, but gives me a penny or so). So far the results have been mixed, but getting better.

The first thing I tried was my basswood cutting project. It failed. I kept getting a 'Blade not detected' error no matter which blade I put in. So, I backed up a bit, followed the Getting Started instructions, and started over. I updated the software and tried a calibration test. Failed with same error. I tried the sample project and it worked. I then decided to try one of my old craft foam projects and it also worked. Looking up.

I called tech support and was greeted with an expected call wait time of one hour and 40 minutes. Eventually it let me leave a voicemail and they did, in fact, call back. Told him everything I did, including reinstalling the software (which the website suggested) and told to send in a video. As an aside, because this machine is on the internet they were able to see it, despite the fact that I was connecting to it via Bluetooth. Nonetheless, they could not diagnose the issue.

I did some more testing today. I tried cutting chipboard (1.5mm thick), which I could do with the other machine, using custom settings. With this new machine the material is already in the list to pick; no need to set custom settings. It also failed with the same error. This was when I noticed that the material from the pick list has a special icon, indicating a 'smart' material. I noticed they had Mat Board (1.5mm) as a material and it did not have that icon, so I tried that and it worked! The blade was recognized. I decided to try and create a custom material, with the exact same settings, and see if it would work. It also did!

It seems like the special icon indicates settings that you cannot set when defining custom materials, i.e. more pressure or more passes of the cut. Something I am sending to tech support. So I am still debugging it, but I am back up and running and far as grinding out foam and chipboard parts, just not basswood parts yet. I can probably switch to balsa wood though, but that is too fragile for gaming, even if I soak it in Future floor wax or superglue.

So, am I happy with the purchase? Actually yes. One feature of the new model was faster cutting, and that is true.  Also, the software can now be downloaded to the computer instead of running only in a browser. Does it cut wood? Not yet, but I am sure that it will when the issue is resolve (or they send me a new unit).

Until then, I have more Dark Ages soldiers to build.