New lower-priced Silhouette cutter coming in November

[Zox]

The "Silhouette Portrait" is coming out in November, with a list price of $199:

http://www.silhouetteamerica.com/newsletter/2012/September/Portrait.pdf

Judging by the descriptions, it's essentially the same as the older Silhouette SD (SSD) that some of us have, except that the Portrait lacks the (largely useless for model railroading purposes, in my experience) ability to print stored designs from SD cards.

Like the SSD, the Portrait is limited to a cutting width of about 8 inches (advertised as "8-1/2 inch wide material"), instead of the 12 inches of the current Silhouette model, the Cameo. Since you can cut very long objects, though, this is really only a limitation if you're cutting single objects that are bigger than 8 inches in both dimensions.

The Cameo lists for $299 (and sells on Amazon for about $269), so the Portrait will definitely be a less expensive option, without giving up much in the way of capability.

[pnolan48]

This seems like a new version of the SSD, without the LED display.

I've found the SSD to be a very usable machine. It has now gone through eight sheets of 4' x 8' 0.020 styrene with only a few hiccups. I cut the sheets into 9" x 24" pieces (about 20 pieces per sheet, or about $0.50 per piece), but have used 9" x 36" pieces for longer ships. By experimentation, I found the maximum cutting width is 210 mm, or 8.27". I did this by marking off small cuts at 1 mm intervals on both sides--it actually only takes a few near the far margin. I find the 9" width feeds nicely into the cutter.

The problem I've had--and it is not that severe--is the SSD cuts with a pressure of only 270 grams (according to reviews), and that it scores 0.020 styrene just enough for a twist and snap separation, with a few shards here and there along the edge. It is not deep enough to cut small windows, even with double passes and an "X" between corners. It does handle 0.010" styrene very well, not completely cutting through, but making it possible to "pop" out square windows (again "X-ed" through the corners). I've also found that a speed of 3 cm per second yields the best and deepest (or at least most easily snapped) cuts.

Oh, and it sometimes quits halfway through a job with many cuts, ruining part of a $0.50 piece of plastic. That I can live with, as I always have uses for the ruined sheets, mostly in building the boxes for molds.

I'm thinking of getting a Black Cougar cutter for $800, with a cutting pressure of 900 grams. I wish I could test one out--yeah, right. Anyone have any experience with one?

[Zox]

Oh, and it sometimes quits halfway through a job with many cuts, ruining part of a $0.50 piece of plastic. That I can live with, as I always have uses for the ruined sheets, mostly in building the boxes for molds.

Pete, can you remind me again what sort of hardware/software you have driving the SSD? Because I've not yet experienced the problem as you describe it. I have to wonder if maybe you have a bad USB cable or something like that.

[pnolan48]

Whoa, never thought of the bad USB cable possibility!

I'm using a 2009 MacBook Pro with OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard?), updated regularly, and Illustrator CS2 (circa 2005) and the RoboCraft 330CL driver. I'd never used Illustrator before I got the SSD, but Canvas 5 on my PPC G5 wouldn't drive it, so I learned it. Illustrator CS2 had a bug that stopped printing about halfway from top to bottom, and I don't know if it was ever fixed, as I worked around it by printing PDFs. So I assumed the SSD was stopping about halfway through a cut due to the CS2 bug.

The new large freighter is so big that I can cut only a relatively few pieces on each 9 x 24 sheet, so I'm not cramming a whole ship onto one of the sheets, with double passes for interior cuts like windows and doors. But I will install a new cable.

I'm thinking of going to the Black Cat Cougar cutter, but can find little about its actual performance (or drivers that I can understand). Cutting pressure is about 3X that of the SSD, and it comes in a variety of bed widths. The 210mm cutting width of the SSD is totally adequate, as is the length, which is either 39" or 44". I have cut 381' Fletcher destroyer hull pieces without a problem.

I'm not really a systems guy any longer (used to be back in the 1980s), but I eventually make things work. Need to sell a few ships to justify the expenditure, and I've really been working more to understand the processes and costs than to marketing at this time. Just as the car companies back in the 1960s, I'm finding small ships are nearly as costly as large ships!