Frage Add Drag Knife / Cutter to Forum "Applications"

I got the drag knife cutter with my stepcraft 2 600 in the US kickstarter. I have no milling experience whatsoever, but so far using the milling operations has been easily learned. I tried to use the drag knife on 0.2 mm vinyl(with removable backing). I have failed miserably to get this working without destroying the vinyl.

I cant seem find any good instructions /examples in this forum, or a good place to ask the following questions.

1. What is the best way to fix the vinyl sheet to the machine and what sacrificial material should i use below the vinyl.

2. Do i set the cutter depth to 0.2 mm or more?

3. How much pressure or excess z distance should be applied to the cutter?

Any other good practices or feed speeds would be very insightful.

Thanks

Hi,
I also got the drag knife with my Steppi and so far I have only cut paper and thin card for a test.

After a quick chat with Rory from Stoney CNC this is how I set it up:

MDF as a sacrificial board
Taped down the paper/vinyl
Set the cut depth to the thickness of the material (digital verniers)
Then brought the Z down until the white plastic bearing just touched the paper
The cut the material

I use Vcarve Pro software and within that there is drag knife gadjet that makes setting up pretty easy. When I cut the card I had to re-run the cut a couple of times for a clean cut.

Hope this helps.