1913 Peugeot

[taylormade]

I bought my wife a Cricut paper cutter awhile ago so she could do her craft thing. It's basically just a C and C machine with different blades to cut various materials. After I saw how accurately this thing could cut I decided to try an experimental project using the Cricut to make a paper model.



I chose an oldie but a goodie in the French Shell series, the 1913 Peugeot. I think it appealed to me due to its toy-like appearance and the vehicle colors. I'm going to make this rather large - the wheels will be four inches in diameter, so I will need to do a lot of redrawing and redesign to make this work. I still plan to make it look more like an expensive child's toy of the period rather than an accurate scale model.




I decided to use chipboard to make the wheels as I felt cardstock would not be strong enough to support a model of this size. I produced the initial artwork in Illustrator, fed it into the Cricut program and made the cuts. I have to admit, my weakness is cutting out parts. At my age, I have neither the eyesight nor patience to cut fine parts or accurate circles, so I was interested to see how my wheel patterns would turn out with a material this thick.





Needless to say, I was impressed - perfect circles, clean cuts and dead-on accuracy.





Even the 3/16 hole in the center of the tire circle was dead on and the perfect size for the dowels I'm using.


I'll keep experimenting and update my progress as this project continues. At the moment I'm very excited about the possibilities of this method.

[TramFan]

This seems to be the answer to cutting out, neat and accurate.
Owen

[Olo]

just wonder how difficult is to transfer A4 paper sheet with small parts into the software so the machine could cut all the parts from it ?

[taylormade]

Print and cut is the biggest drawback with the Cricut. The largest size you can print and cut is 6.75 by 9.25 inches. It will cut larger sizes, but as shapes only up to 11 by 24 inches. Things like ship frames and the like are easy and provide accurate cuts. I use Photoshop and Illustrator to arrange parts into the smaller work area if I have to print and cut. This doesn't help if you want to cut out a kit page, unless you're willing to scan it and take it into a program to rearrange it to a 6.75 by 9.25 page, then print it and feed it into the Cricut. Since I design or redesign most of my models, this doesn't bother me. In the case of the Peugeot, I loaded the PDF sheet into Illustrator and redrew everything, arranging and resizing the parts so they would fit on the proper sized sheet.


Here is the artwork I just finished for the wheel and tire I cut out yesterday. It is 6.75 by 9.25 inches. As you can see, I can only fit one wheel and tire on the page since the tires are so large - 4 inches in diameter. I'll post the process of loading it into Cricut as soon as I get a chance.

[taylormade]

Here is how I load artwork into the Cricut machine for print and cut. Cricut comes with a program called Design Space. You simply drag your artwork into Design Space. I bring them in as PNG files with an Alpha or transparent background so it instantly knows what is to be cut out.





Once I have the artwork loaded and saved, I put it on the Design Space grid. This allows me to size the image. it very important hat you have something on the artwork that extends edge to edge in one of the two directions. It can be as simple as a line. This is necessary to properly scale the image as it will not come in in the correct size - it's always larger for some reason. If you don't do this, all your sheets will be a different scale - not a good situation.



Here is the artwork properly scaled with a 9.25 inch height. The software will add a bleed area of the correct color around each object to be cut out in case there is a slightly inaccurate cut.



Now you can send the artwork to your printer and it will print out the image with a black reference line around it to calibrate the Cricut machine when it cuts. You stick the printed artwork on a special sheet that holds it in place with a tacky surface. Then you load the whole thing into the machine and hit cut and your artwork is perfectly cut out.





These are just stacked and not glued down, but you can see the accuracy of the cuts.





I hope this give some idea of the process I use. The learning curve is not all that steep once you get a handle on the basics of how the machine and the software works. As I said, the only drawback is the size of the image you can print and cut. It actually used to be smaller, but they finally enlarged it to 9.25 by 6.75 inches. For most projects you can find workarounds to fit your parts in this size, you'll just have a few more sheets to deal with.