1a) That's what I'm doing, and it doesn't work beyond 24". Even that seems to be dependent on what mat you last used.
Started up the software and let it open a new file, no content. Cut the media width down to 8" to suit the portrait cutter, and you get :
Extend the media area to 30", and you get :
Red box is the cutting area, 24" long. I've tried put things on that extend into the last 6in, and all the lines simply stop at the virtual 'edge'. Normally this red box would still be only 12" long, but I'd previously had it set to a 12x24" mat, and I think it had retained those settings.
Too 'prove' this was the issue, I then selected the Portrait 8x12" mat, which cut the cut area down to suit (sorry, forgot to grab a screenshot), and then selected 'none' again. As if by magic the area stayed at 8x12" as determined by the now unselected mat :
I can flick it back to 8x24" by choosing the 12x24" cameo mat again and then deselecting it, but I can't get anything bigger than that.
I've been in the silhouette website, and while it says in several places that you can run up to 120" long for materials that don't need a mat, no where can I find instructions on how. Ditto the manual. If no one else has done it, I guess it's time to email Silhouette.
1b) Thank you, done. Haven't tried it yet, will tomorrow when I have something new drawn up to cut.
2) It has done about 6-8 hours of actual cutting, all at slow speed and 'high' depth settings on 20 and 30thou material. So I'm not totally surprised. After about 4 hours there was the very distinctive sound of a stepper motor stall, and the line it was doing at the time was short, displacing everything else it did afterwards. I'm reading this as the blade being too blunt to drive through the material at the rated torque. I'm still using the blade, having dialed it down to depth to 7 with no repeat of the stall, but I think it's on it's last legs.
As an aside, I don't quite agree with the idea of setting the depth to 10 for thicker sheet. After the initial stall, I fitted my unused spare blade and cut a series of identical rectangles in a range of blade depths from 10 down to 3, all in 30th material. Then I tried snapping them out to get a measure of how deep the score was. I could detect no difference 10-9-8-7, a slight change to 6, and then it got noticeably different (harder) each time. Hence choosing 7.
This sort of makes sense to me mechanically - as far as I can see there's no very sophisticated pressure mechanism, just locked up and down. So if your blade on 10 (1mm protrusion) is failing to penetrate 20thou/0.5mm material, that means the tip of the blade is at the bottom of the cut, rather less than 0.5mm down. If the blade is 'out' more than that the top of the casing must be correspondingly 'up', ie you're deforming the machine crossbar to provide the downward pressure. That's fine within limits, but there'll come a point where more deformation ( = more pressure) doesn't result in meaningfully greater cut depth, it just increases the machine friction. Which I think is 7 on my machine.
3) I'll have another go just in case I missed one. If that doesn't work I'll ask the mob what sold it to me.
Thanks,
J.
PS : Oh, and I've lurked here for a long while, just rarely post anything. Anywhere, ever.