Drag Knife (inexpensive)

[danhamm]

If you dont want to break the bank and are able to do some simple mods.

Here is a very solid steel body drag knife capable of cutting 1/8 inch card board, magnet sheets and even thin aluminum.

Price check online.. for Cricut Deep cut Blade Housing I paid 28.00 for it.

I had to make a sleeve for the body, and grind off one rib.

Amazing little knife...If you need more info PM me...

[danhamm]

Its not as good as quality as the one Sean was proposing, it has its limitations...its max is 1/8 inch, you have to run really slow and your table has to be dead level, I use a sheet of lexan under the material I am cutting..

But its cheap and it trains you to be accurate or it won't work..
also the knife is held in by a magnet so you have to ramp in and out or
the knife will be left behind when your z-xis goes to its clearence height.

[terryjones]

I think I found a source if this is the correct item. I googled it and one of the hits showed this link to Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001HL2Q8A/ref=asc_df_B001HL2Q8A2064219?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=asn&creative=395093&creativeASIN=B001HL2Q8A&hvpos=1o1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=20624102681836095373&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=

[adana]

It's funny, I'd wanted to try this a while back, gathered the necessary parts last year, but didn't get around to doing so until... late June! I haven't been staying on top of this forum, so I didn't see this post until just now. Great coincidence, though.

I purchased a 5/8" collet from Maritool (http://www.maritool.com/Collets-ER-Collets-ER25-Collets/c21_56_63/index.html?page=2), which allowed me to use the Cricut blade holder without any modification.

Using the ZZero plate is dicey. The blade sometimes jabs pretty hard into the aluminum plate before it registers. Also, the normal (not deep cut) Cricut blade holder doesn't work at all. Maybe a different anodizing process reduces conductivity or something?

Ramping sounds like a great idea. I've had real problems with the blade falling out and staying behind when the spindle moves up to the safe height. If the safe height is low, it will do a rapid traverse move with the blade still in the workpiece, yuck. For now I just set the safe height to be greater than the blade length, so I can pause and reinsert the blade if necessary. That's obviously a dumb workaround.

In Partworks I understand the "ramp in" options for a profile toolpath, but I'm not sure how to ramp out. I could do it as a fluting toolpath, but then it would leave part of the work uncut, right? Is it possible to ramp out with Partworks?

Great to see this topic here.

[Joe Porter]

Look at the "Lead" tab next to "Ramp". I think this will do what you want...joe

[adana]

Interesting... I've never played with that. I tried it just now and it appears it's coming down to the cutting Z level off to the side and then leading into the profile. For the parts I'm working on I can't have it do that overcut, unfortunately.

Ramping, on the other hand, happens all in the Z direction while staying over the intended cut vector. Just need to have it do that on the way out of the cut.

Thanks, though!