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Simple CNC Drag Knife
10 Oct 2019

I needed a drag knife to cut out a lot of paper and plastic sheets for the new slate design and after a quick search I only found drag knife tools typically in the $100+ range. Some of which is well over the price of a hobby Cricut cutting machine. However instead of buying a Cricut cutting machine with extremely limited cloud based software, it looked like the cutter used in these cheap machines could somehow be adapted to fit into one of the collets for my CNC. So I ended up purchasing https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R6MFM32/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 set, these knife is free spinning on a bearing inside the houseing and helf in there with a magnet. Becareful when purchasing other housing as it looks like some of them are not free spinning and have a gear at the top so the machine can rotate the knife instead. I then cut a 3/4" aluminum tube and use JB Weld to epoxy the cutter housing inside the tube. Fit's perfectly inside the 3/4" collet. Using HSMWorks and Solidworks I could draw out the shapes I needed cut, keep not that you must have a small radius on the corners so the knife can rotate in line with the change of direction. The results turned out amazing, and I can achieve a much higher accuracy and proper scale with no guess work than the janky software most of the craft cutting machines can do.

A004 C015 092234.0000205s

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Last modified on Thursday, 10 October 2019 07:11