The road trip out to my sister’s was interesting and fruitful. I got to test out my Heekscad generated DXF file to import to the Pazzles software it exposed some issues I need to work through. These are necessarily problems with anyone’s software just as I said thinks I got to work out.
- Need to make sure that the image is scaled to fit on the paper (big duh) Pazzle software had scale feature which let me scale to fit
The paper is mounted on a thick (~.03″ ) plastic sheet (aka “cutting matt”) which has a 3m post it type of adhesive on it. This basically keeps your work from doing weird things when you cut around it. There is about a 1/4″ -1/2 non-sticky margin where the main drive rollers ride on which advance the sheet. Really a clever arrangement.
The kinematics of the Pazzles Inspiration sort of remind me of the old HP7475 pen plotter. The drive belt looks pretty thick which makes sense since this thing moves way slower and generates more forces as the inspiration cuts the paper with this needle tip cutter mounted on the carriage. (I didn’t have time to take a good look at that). The stepper motors seemed sort of loud to me. I guess it does the job. It didn’t sound like there was any micro-stepping going on there.
I was just blue skying about how you could built a machine with out the sticky stuff solution. Perhaps, a solid board with minute perforations which would hold the paper to the board via vacuum? As my mind wanders sipping my morning coffee, I wonder how production die-cutting works.. (another topic for another day…. back on task boy….)
I had not really thought about how to create a fold line. There are a couple of different ways of doing this. The method that is use by the Pazzles software is to basically generate a hidden line ( aka ” – – – – – – “) which the Pazzles Inspirations can generate. In the paper crafting lingo this is called a “kiss cut”. My DXF test file had non of this, but my sister had this WPC file (which is the native file for the Pazzle Inspiration) which would cut out this pie shaped container for a party favour. This was interesting because it not only cut out the outline but also generated the fold lines. At this point, I wanted ran an experiment, which led to some disappointing results. I exported the WPC file into a DXF and then created a new project and re-imported the file. This all worked fine expect the kiss-cut lines became solid cut lines. This is a problem.
- Need to figure out if is possible to import “kiss cut” data into a DXF.
Ah heck time to do a little googling”) Hmm… Perhaps I’m not asking the questions write but I’m not getting any hits. I think I might test the Pazzles customer support line at lunch tomorrow to see if they can address that issue for me.
I was also having issues with manually converting the solid cut lines to “kiss cut” lines. At this point, I think this is more from the lack of familiarity of using the Pazzles software. The monkey keying approach was not very successful. Time to skim through the manual). Some details which need to ironed out but I think I have access to tools that I need to design and cut out some prototypes.
Not so familiar with the Pazzles software, but for my machine (Craft Robo), you can use either layers or different colors and set the cutting lines differently for each layer/color. There are “stock” dotted lines to choose or you can set your own size. Very useful!