cutting magnets ?

[Paul Goodwin]

nope i use my knife 🙂

[Kevin Flowers]

Hi
the person to speak to is Harry at Edward Mathius he knows all that needs to be known about cutting blades. However summa do make an heavy duty cutter which cuts reflective and heavy duty sandblast which probably would cut the magnetic. Using your versacamm to cut magnetic could end up costing you, they are not built to cut that type of material it will put loads of extra strain on the gear.

Kev

[juddr]

out of interest are all these cut by hand?? i was looking at some magnetics on a taxi this morning and the magnetic material was cut very nicely following the graphics almost exactly, i asumed it would be a pain to do by hand as there was lots of curves etc… just wondering..

[Robert Lambie]

i would steer away from this.. the only cutters i think are made for this sort of thing are flatbed cutters.
use anything else and you will kill your blade carriage, many blades and eventualy wear the workings.

cant remember if someone corrected or agreed with me in the past, but…
magnet wipes your machines memory chips does it not?

[Andy Gorman]

I wouldn’t put magnetic through my plotter! Blimey, no. The only plotter I’ve ever felt happy about using to cut magnetic was a £100K Zund flatbed. Flat bed plotters tend to be designed for heavy duty use like this. You may well find a blade that will do the job, but I dread to think of the wear and tear it is putting on the cutting mechanism, not to mention the cutting strip on the plotter. By the way, when I want to cut shaped panels I leave a shaped weed border around the vinyl and use this as a cutting guide to cut by hand. I always find using a scalpel, rather than a stanley knife gives better control. Good results can be achieved with a bit of practice and care.

[Rodney Gold]

You need the heavy duty blade to do this , a 60 degree blade , the same one used for cutting road markings. All you really need to do is score the magnetic , not cut right thru , it breaks away quite easily We do a 2x pass (can be programmed in the rip ) at about a speed of 5 (depending on the shape , DONT do sharp corners). We also use the thinner magnetic and print directly to it. We lam it for vehicle applications.

[curt]

I cut magnetcs all the time thru my cutter. And I know several others that do as well.

No, magnetics will NOT wipe your cutter memory..

First make sure you have a barrier betwen the magnetic and yoru cutter body, OR it will stick.. I use a 4 mil coro panel

Second slow the feed speed down..

Next use an old blade. IT will score the material just enuf. It dotn take much scoring to get the mga material to break loose..

Next take your your job and carefully break off (weed) your job.

Works perfect every time

Only caveat, Make sure you have a cutter that will handle sandblast mask. A light duty cutter will not handle the drag caused by the heavier material.

And ive never done a job bigger than a few inches on a side..

[teepee]

The reason the Summa is so good is that Summa make a ‘tangential’ plotter which cuts up to 600gm pressure – most other plotters only go to 400gm maximum and the small Rolands won’t even do that !

check out the Summa on http://www.summadirect.co.uk

[teepee]

forgot to say there is a very thin magnetic media available from Taiwan now with vinyl on one side which you can print onto ! Cuts real easy as well !