Views & Advice on the Summa T160 Vinyl Cutter?

[Chris Wool]

i always wanted a S class T but a couple of board members put me of them after there experience of ownership.
tangentle comes in to its own with tough stuff for normal vinyl its a pain in the rear.
6000 is still enough for s/hand

chris

[Clive Martinez]

Thanks for your reply,
I was under the impression its was the best money could buy, knowing it would do the thicker material, I wouldn’t have thought it would be a pain to do the normal stuff.

Does anyone know if I could change head on it and put a normal drag knife, or whether you can disable the tangential mechanism?

[Tobias Redig]

We’ve got a S140T. I’m loving it now when I’ve gotten used to setting it up. You need to keep an eye out for both the cutting depth and the pressure. Cutting to deep/hard will dull the blade very fast making it useless. Correctly setup the blade will last for a long long time though.

And if you’d rather use it as a dragknife cutter it does come with a dragknife tool. Just change out the tool and the nosepiece in the cutter head and change the setting in the cutter to use dragknife and the correct knife offset.

[Clive Martinez]

Thank you for that information. As I intend to buy second hand one, I don’t know if it will have the drag knife tool, but I imagine it is something I can buy on its own?
Does anyone else have any comments on this machine?

[John Childs]

Maybe my experience isn’t valid any more, but many years ago, when the early friction fed machines weren’t up to doing long lengths, and drag knife machines couldn’t get the quality, we bought a Summa T1010+ because it had the option of using friction or sprocketed vinyl, and tangential or drag cutting. A very versatile machine.

Of course, times have changed, cutters have improved, and we haven’t needed sprockets or tangential for years. When I look to buy a new cutter these days, those features don’t enter my mind.

I would be surprised if a newer machine didn’t give you the option to use a drag blade and, although tangential might be useful to you for specific jobs in the future, I would say that the likelihood of that happening isn’t worth paying a big premium.

I would say that our T1010+ was a good machine, very robust, and well suited to production use. Definitely not a hobby cutter.

[Alan Drury]

I have a Summa Sign Pro 750 with tangential head and it came with the drag knife attachment. The tangential head was better than the drag, I use it daily with ordinary vinyl and the quality of cut is outstanding as is the tracking. I wouldn’t have said 6000 euros was overly cheap though.
Alan D

[Clive Martinez]

If the machine is in good condition, what would be a good price?
I think they are about £11.000 new….

[Tobias Redig]

We paid around 9000€ for ours about 2 years ago. It’s a smaller machine though at 140 cm width.