Hi,

I stumbled upon a very interesting thread here on RMweb a couple of weeks ago. The name of it was 'A guide to using the Silhouette Cameo cutter, by JCL. For those who don't know of these machines they're similar to an inkjet printer but instead of a print head they have a tiny blade which cuts designs out of a sheet of thin material which has been fed into it.

Primarily they're designed for cutting shapes out of thin card, vinyl, or paper for things like scrap booking etc, but some of the guys on RMweb have used them to great effect for cutting intricate shapes from plastic card.

The Silhouette comes with its own software to use for the actual cutting, it is very limited for design work and so a design program such as Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Coraldraw, eIc must be used for the design.

I myself have never used one of these type of programs, all my designs to date have been done with a pencil and ruler on the back of a fag packet, so it's been back to school for me. There is an excellent tutorial under the Special interests / 3D printing, Laser cutting heading called 'Introduction to Inkscape' by Mike Trice which I've been studying and I've now got to the stage where I can turn out a fairly simple design and that's what I did.

I found a diagram online containing a covered wagon body, simply 2 sides, 2 inner ends, 2 outer ends, Roof, sub roof, base, that's it nice and simple.

I imported the design into Inkscape and used it as a guide to super-impose my own cut lines. This was saved as a DXF file ( Direct eXchange Format) which is the format that the silhouette's own software accepts, this is saved in the Silhouette with a Silhouette Studio 3 extension, this is what the cutter reads to perform it's work.After much trial and tribulation I managed to get the cutter to cut it out. I cut it on ordinary printer paper first to make sure I had it aligned in the right place on the screen and then on 10thou card. I performed multiple cuts gradually adjusting the settings to cut deeper but not to cut too deep and ruin the sticky cutting mat under the paper/card.

So here's a few photos of what I've done so far.

This is the cut out from paper I forgot to photograph the parts prior to assembly

The assembled body parts with a section added to support the roof

The base with solebars added, these were 3mm channel

The next stage, designing and cutting 'W' irons and axlebox parts

I cut the W irons and axleboxes from 0.2mm thick plastic card which is only slightly thicker than paper so several had to be laminated to make up the thickness to 1mm. The reason for using such thin card was that I wasn't sure if the Silhouette would cut the tiny,intricate design successfully from thicker plastic, this needs further investigation. I'm now working on the Mark 2 design of W iron this will include attachment tags forgotten in the original. This is one aspect of this method in that you can just design and cut modifications as they arise.

I can't show you this as the website won't allow this kind of file to be uploaded, but I'll photograph the results when I have completed and cut the parts.

cheers for now

Edited to add categories and tags that always disappear while typing the main text