First Purchase Advice

[Brian Hays]

Most cutters these days are drag knife. Unless you are mostly going to be cutting thick material such as sandblast rubber or the thicker reflective materials there is little or no point. Tangential cutters were at one time considered to be better for cutting small letters. There is a post on here somewhere by Mike showing some 2mm? letters that he cut on a drag knife machine that I think disproves this point.

[Jon Aston]

I would go with tangential…assuming you can afford the difference. Why limit the number of materials you can use if you can afford not to?

[Brian Hays]

I am yet to find a material that can be cut on a T series Summa that can’t be cut on an FC series Graphtec for example.

[Robert Lambie]

i have a graphtec. great machine…

it has drag knife and tangental functions.. both functions are very fast! 😉

[Brian Hays]

Surely there must be more of you willing to give some advice 😮

Do any that use drag knife cutters here (which I would imagine is by far the majority) find you are limited as to what materials you can cut? My guess is that most probably you don’t.

[Robert Lambie]

i use both tangental and drag functions to cut vinyl only. i know there are plenty more materials our machines are more than capable of cutting.
but never venture down that road as our 4 machines are working flat out as it is.
the only substrate i reckon i would atempt to cut to save us time is magnetic panel. we never try it though as ive heard the magnet can wipe the memory/chips of the machine..

perhaps you could elaborate on what other benifits a graptec or roland has other than cutting vinyl? 🙄

[Brian Hays]

Who me? 😮

Maybe you should direct the question to Jon. He is the one suggesting buying a drag knife plotter is limiting.

The hardest stuff I have come across to cut is class 1 reflective vinyl? not sure if thats the right name. Anyway the honeycombed stuff. Even tangetial machines would struggle cutting that stuff day in day out.

Anyway you have answred one question for me, you don’t find a drag knife at all limiting 😆

[Mike Brown]

…I use a dragknife Graphtec – it’s brill!

Always found the tangential blade machines – especially the earlier spandex machines – were so noisy! Sounded like some contraption!

Dragknifes are beautfiul, simple and quiet…GET ONE!

more soon

mikethesign

[Gi Graphics]

Thanks,
Cheers for the advice. I think I get the point. A dragknife appears to be favoured, and who am I to argue. You will let me know when you get tired of all of my questions, won’t you ? (because I’m only just getting warmed up). Thanks again, much appreciated.
Paul

[John Childs]

I suppose that it depends on your client base. If you have clients needing a lot of sandblast or similar then you probably need a tangential.

We prefer drag knife machines as we find them faster, quieter, cheaper and easier to weed. We do keep an old Summa T1010+ in service in case we ever need tangential but as I can’t remember the last time we configured it to work that way, when it breaks down I would replace it with a drag machine.

[Steve Broughton]

I use a drag knife machine AND have cut sandblast material on it no problem.

[Robert Lambie]

quote :

let me know when you get tired of all of my questions

keep them coming mate.. its good to have fresh questions. even if begginer stuff, it may not help some of us old pros, but there are tons of newbies needing to know the new comer stuff.. 😉

[mikedasike]

We have 3 Gerber plotters and a Camm 1. The Gerbers are usually run with the swivel blade unless we are cutting sandblast or reflective film. Bigger question might be tractor or friction feed.