jpendle

Living in the US I use Hattons BECAUSE they offer tracked shipping options. There's nothing more frustrating, to me, than placing an order for a couple hundred of dollars worth of loco's and then have the shipment dissapear into the ether.

About 5 years ago I placed an order with Hattons using Royal Mail Airmail and it never arrived, I called them and they redid the order no questions asked, but in all it took over 6 weeks to get the goods. Nowadays I use their DHL option and typically receive the orders within 2 business days with full tracking.

I recently ordered some stuff from another well respected Model shop in the UK. I placed the order at the beginning of December hoping to get the goods before Christmas, and they acutally arrived in under two weeks using their standard Royal Mail Airmail option, so far so good. BUT the loco I had ordered didn't run, so I sent it back to them mid January and used the US Postal Service Tracked option which cost an extortionate $50, the loco only costs $100!, but I didn't want to wait months to get the loco sorted. The loco arrived at the model shop within two days, they fiddled with it for a while and then replaced the chassis and returned it to me by standard airmail on February 18th, It's still not here and I have no way of figuring out when it arrive or whether its been lost.

For me, personally, I'd always rather have the peace of mind that tracked shipments give you, even if its 2-3 times the standard airmail price.

John P

That's certainly normal if you use the Silhouette software. If you draw a rectangle it cuts it as one shape. If you draw 4 lines as a rectangle it cuts 4 lines

John P

The PDF to TIFF converter that I tried will only do greyscale TIFF. But if I convert to BMP or JPG I get full colour.

I'll look online for another converter.

John P

Thanks Mike

I knew there had to be an option somewhere but I was looking at the print options.

BTW I can't use TIFF as I need colour for the Scalescenes kits

John P

Just came across an interesting feature when trying to use the cutter to cut Scalesecenes kits.

First I converted the Scalescenes PDF to a JPG file, as the Silhouette software won't import PDF files.

I then loaded the JPG to the Silhouette software and added cut lines around the various pieces, I then printed it out and then cut it. Af ter I'd done this I compared the pieces I'd cut to some I'd cut by hand and founs that they were bigger, around 10% bigger! There was seemed to be no prin options to fix this, so I ended up creating 9mm line in the Silhouette software so that I could correctly shrink the JPG image down until the long edge of one of the pieces I was cutting measured 9mm, I did this on both the horizontal and vertical axes to make sure that I'd scaled the JPG correctly.

So now my kits are the right size and I can cut them on the cutter.

John P

As long as those two points at T3 are fully isolated then yes it should work.

John P

Looking at your wiring diagram I think you will have a short circuit on the T3 crossover. You show a continually live track on the right hand side of T3. THis means that if just the toe of the point is isolated you will get a short circuit when the 2 points are switched to allow movement from one track to the next. For these 2 points you need to insulate all 3 tracks to avoide short circuits. For the upper tracks with points T1 and T2 you don't strictly need to isolate the points but you could still gtet a short of you select P1 as the route the point is facing and then switch on P2 by mistake from the controller.

Your best bet would be to fully isolate all the points then you won't get any short circuits.

John  P

Fort Collins Colorado has the BNSF Sub from Denver to Cheyenne running down the middle of Mason street, around 6-8 trains a day.Since these videos were taken the rail road tracks have been seperated from the rest of the traffic by kerbing which alows the trains to run through town faster. But you can still drive down the street with a very large train at your side doing the same thing

John P

The big question is whether the cutter can cut masking tape accurately, and unfortunately I have not tried it so I have no idea. It might be that the glue on the tape or the thickness of the tape precludes a clean cut, I guess soneone would have to 'suck it and see'!

Assuming it would cut then you wouldn't need to paint the styrene, I would do at least two passes, one to cut my styrene to my desired shape and a second pass where I just load the masking tape sepereate from the styrene to cut out my masks.

Of course the other option is to print the entire coach side design onto card and then laminate it to the coach side as an overlay.

John P

Stupid Question:

If you were to paint a piece of, say, 20thou plastic then stick masking tape on top, is the cutter capable of cutting a shape from the masking tape without damaging the paint underneath?

it depends what you are trying to do. If you are just painting some kind of background colour on the styrene then I would think you don't need the masking tape. The cutter is very accurate and wouldn't damage the surface finish of the paint when cutting out a shape.

If you are trying to paint a specific thing, like a wall or coach side then you need to use the cutter software to first print your design on the styrene with registration marks and then load the printed sheet into the cutter for cutting. Now the issue would be whether you are able to print anyhting on styrene. Alternatives are to print onto label paper or plain card and then use the cutter to cut the printed material and the styrene and then laminate the two together.

Regards,

John P

I decided to use the cutter to have a go at creating the front wall of one of the paltform buildings at Bolton Trinity Street.

Here's what I am aiming for.

Unfortunately all my pictures and all the ones I can find on the web show these buildings at an angle. Ideally I would have used a perfectly composed front view of the building and then just resized it and then printed it off. I didn't have a good shot of the front so I took the best view I had, which was an end wall and imported it into the Silhouette software, I then resized it and cropped it to give me a section of tan brick and another section of the darker brick. I then created guide lines on a scale wall and overlaid the different brick colours. I also created window and door frames and added a blue door to my print section. I ended up with 3 files, one to cut a rectangle of clear styrene to represent glazing, one to print and cut the wall and the door on card, and one to cut out another wall along with all the window frames and the door frame, but this time in styrene.

Here are the cut pieces before assembly

And here is the assembled front wall.

I've had to sacrifice some detail in the upper window frames and also on close inspection you can see that my brickwork slopes down to the right, but at normal viewing distances this isn't noticable. I wasn't able to reproduce the fancy brickwork over the arches,but on my next trip back to the UK I'll be taking a lot more photos of Bolton station. I'd also like to get a better colour match on the door, its too flat, but other than that I'm pleased with the result, especially as this is the first time I've tried to scratch build anything.

Now I just need to get the other 3 walls done.

John Pendlebury

I finally got my Portrait machine to cut through 5 thou Styrene, although I had to fiddle with the settings to get there. I eventually set up my machine with a blade setting of 10, a thickness of 15, and speed set to 1.

This cut some 1:148 scale door frames for me.

The smallest parts are around 0.5mm wide which I think is reaching the limits of the cutter.

So far so good, but I'd be interested to hear what settings other users are using to get their machine to cut, rather than score styrene.

John Pendlebury

Thanks Mike

I'm one of the people on the cutting thread that doesn't know one end of a CAD system from the other so I'm finding this very useful.

Keep it up

John Pendlebury

Hi JCL,

In an earlier post you mention cutting styrene up to 0.015". I just tried this on my Portrait and can't get anything better than score lines on 0.015" styrene. What settings did you use to cut styrene?

Thanks,

   John

ive only just discovered this thread, what a fantastic machine!

 

having read the spec on the silhouette website im still not sure about something, namely, if you draw up a design on paper and feed it into the machine it says it uses plotting points to scan the design then you set to cut mode and it does it, am i reading it right?

 

also looking back at the post of the scanned carriage side someone did, can you scan a design with a conventional scanner and use the supplied software to import it and produce a pattern?

 

the reason i ask is i struggle with CAD programs, im willing to learn, but being able to say trace a design or do something freehand would be a bonus

 

i dont know what i'd use one for but im liking some of the ideas i'm seeing and im sure i could justify one if one came up at a good price!!

If you draw a design on paper you would need to use a scanner to get it into some digital format. You would then import the scanned design to the Silhouette software and use the Silhouette software to add registration marks, you would also need to use the Silhouette Trace tool so that the cutter software knows where the edges of your design are, the trace tool works pretty well for black and white or high contrast designs. Once you've done all that if its a colour design then you would need to print it out and then feed it into the cutter, if you just need to cut you can send the design straight to the cutter.

Regards,

   John

I'm pleased to hear you're getting better results John. I did try it a few times at the beginning on a set of gates I was having a go at, but there always seemed to be lines that were out of whack on the corners or rounded corners when they should have been square. In the end I bit the bullet and drew the designs myself. Now I find it faster to draw the designs from scratch than to trace and edit points.

 

What sort of thing do you think you'll be using the cutter for?

 

cheers

 

Jason

I'm planning to use it for structures, station buildings, canopies, and valances. My layout is based on Bolton Trinity street so I've got some large Victorian platform buildings to model

John

It's all part of the learning curve

I started again but this time used the retaining wall kit

I erased the extra lettering and such and then traced the outlines. This time I got much better results, I then added extra cut lines to separate out the various pieces. I tried a cut and it worked really well

Now I need to get up to speed on drawing my own designs

John Pendlebury

I don't think I'm normally given to bursts of over-enthusiasm but I've just given my new 'Portrait' cutter an initial test - just drawing with a biro.  I loaded a scanned image (jpeg) of a drawing from a book, then used the 'Trace' command in the 'Studio' software to create a vector drawing, automatically, which I simply drew! 

 

Silhouette1stTest.jpg

 

I could not have believed it could be so easy. Of course, this particular drawing was not designed for cutting but the potential seems enormous

 

Mike

Hi,

 I just bought a Portrait based on this thread, it arrived yesterday and I've been playing around this morning. Getting the blade to cut anything at all took me half an hour but finally I got some rectangles and circles cut out.

I then tried to scan an image. I have a number of scalescenes kits , so I uploaded the container kit after concerting from PDF to JPEG. So far so good, but the problem arose when trying to get the Silhouette trace tool to find the outer edge of the containers. I thought that as the containers are pretty much just rectangles that this would be ideal for the trace tool, but how wrong can you be. The trace tool picked up loads of internal detail on the boxes and after a bunch of fiffling with the trace setings I finally got what looked like some good outlines traced. But then the registration marks didn't show up proerley so now its back to square one to try again.

John Pendlebury

Ben,

Do you know when the timber carriers will be available to purchase?

Thanks

John Pendlebury