I found the MPCNC via thingiverse looking for Cricut hacks. Funnily enough, I don’t own either at this point. I am looking to either build a MPCNC or buy a Cricut maker… however, I have some questions.
One of my main hobbies is 3D printing and the other is Sewing. Yes, Sewing! I make bags, packs and accessories for the outdoors and my day job as a firefighter. I am looking for a way to cut heavy duty fabric easily and precisely with a minimal hobby budget.
I’ve seen the drag knife post that Ryan put out and several videos on youtube. However, I haven’t seen anyone cutting things around, say 0.5mm to 1mm thick with such a tool. Is it possible with the MPCNC?
The fabric I will be cutting varies from heavy Vinyl Coated Polyester (Truck Tarp material 0.6mm) to Cordura woven nylon and other minimally thick technical fabrics.
My questions are; If you were going to cut fabric on a regular basis, would you consider the MPCNC or the Cricut maker? … or something else?
For either of those materials, you’ll need a circular razor cutter. I don’t know if anyone has followed up much on the rotatable cutter head for the mpcnc. The cricut rotary cutter head is geared so before every cut it turns the blade to align with the cut. A drag knife won’t work for this application. You might be able to cut those materials with a laser, but again, not 100% on that, and you’d need to deal with the smoke, which some of might be really unhealthy depending on the fabric coatings. At this point in time, I’d go with the cricut maker, and not a mpcnc.
I actually just sold a 50w laser. I didn’t like the 30 minutes of setup (air, water, cooling, smoke ejection) to cut simple stuff which was further compounded by the items you mentioned. Ie. harmful gases. You can not cut vinyl with a laser as it releases Chlorine gas and will destroy any metal in the laser enclosure.
I have been looking at the Donek style drag knives that have been mentioned here and what I’ve searched on Thingiverse. For example: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1933416. Everything has a trade off to be sure, but I’ve seen some really nice cuts from the Donek blade on 3mm leather. The VCP I cut is a lot like thin leather.
Would that style blade work with the MPCNC?
The most important thing, I suppose would be the software to drive the corners. I wonder if anyone has used Donek’s stuff with the MPCNC…???
I have a Donek drag knife ordered, way back when, to try my hand at cutting foamboard RC plane parts with my MPCNC… but, being the elite procrastinator that I am, I never got around to actually doing it. I really suspect it would do well for your application but that’s just speculation on my part, based on the videos on the Donek site. They are not inexpensive (~$250) but are a quality tool and I suspect far more robust than the printed drag knives out on Thingiverse.
The corner compensation “software” Donek offers (free download) is just a Excel spreadsheet macro which post-processes the gcode file you’ve generated conventionally. It appears to work fine from what I’ve seen but, being old and a Linux snob, I rarely see much need to fire up a Windows box. So, shoot me…
The 1/4" shank of the Donek knife would fit in the Dewalt 660 collet so should be relatively easy to test. I may start piddling around with it now that you’ve reminded me I have it to play with…
I wasn’t aware there was a clone of Excel for Linux… that ran Excel’s macro language successfully. OpenOffice’s Calc was the closest thing I knew of for simple Excel spreadsheets but anything with user macros was always problematic. It’s been along time since I messed with it though…