A pair of Airfix Hawks in 1/72. Finished.

[Terry1954]

21 minutes ago, CedB said:

I reckon you should invest in one and 'join the cutter club'.

You have convinced me Ced. I have to belong to this club!

Terry

[TheBaron]

11 hours ago, Fritag said:

That said, the cutter would have to cut very finely indeed to cut out an MDC outline or make a mask that you could use to spray on the MDC. 

Steve. I *think* that shape - complex as it is - might be on the limits of cuttability with the Silhouette. Why not send me your digital design and we'll try a test cut in metal foil just to be sure?

 

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Suddenly I am feeling quite sane.

[perdu]

I'm not...

[kev67]

I have a Cameo Silhouette cutter, they are really good for cutting masks such as serial numbers and letters and insignia, but they have there limitations on how fine they can cut because of the size of blade, and my own experience to try and cut something as fine as the MDC, the material would probably fold up onto the blade with all those intricate lines

[Fritag]

2 hours ago, TheBaron said:

Steve. I *think* that shape - complex as it is - might be on the limits of cuttability with the Silhouette. Why not send me your digital design and we'll try a test cut in metal foil just to be sure?

 

From what Kev says

 

1 hour ago, kev67 said:

the material would probably fold up onto the blade with all those intricate lines

 

It may be that your suspicion is correct, Tony.

 

That said, I'd like to find out more of the limits of cuttability with the Silhouette, and if your kind offer still applies I'll forward you the artwork.  I'm not sure what format you'd want it in.

 

It was drawn on a Mac with 'Graphic and so saved as an '.idraw' file.  I can export the artwork in various formats (PDF, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PSD, SVG & PNG).

 

I created it on an A4 size background IIRC with 2 of 2 versions (0.6pt and 0.7pt) per page.  Here's a JPEG export.

 

It's made me realise that if and when I do any more artwork for etching I'm probably gonna have to effectively learn too use 'Graphic' again from scratch.

 

 

 

[Fritag]

5 hours ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

Suddenly I am feeling quite sane.

 

5 hours ago, perdu said:

I'm not...

 

Hmm.  If I interrogate myself it turns out that I find only one of those two statements credible.........

Edited August 1, 2019 by Fritag

[perdu]

Age, no doubt, trumps beauty

 

Again...

 

🍻

[xffw45343tg]

BTW, I'm reasonably sure that the MDC continues around the perimeter of the canopy - I think the idea is to blow the whole thing outwards in pieces rather than just make a hole above the pilots' heads. It's just if you wanted to make the whole thing any more complex it is just about possible.

[TheBaron]

2 hours ago, Fritag said:

That said, I'd like to find out more of the limits of cuttability with the Silhouette, and if your kind offer still applies I'll forward you the artwork.  I'm not sure what format you'd want it in

Kev's no doubt on the right side of sane here Steve but nonetheless it can't hurt to test the process to destruction (if only to provide a negative confirmation).

 

If you can bung me an output in SVG or uncompressed TIFF let's give this a shot!

 

PS. Can you let me know the exact length + width the design should be as the Silhoutte software ain't the cleverest at retaining scale...

 

PPS. Believe nothing Bill or Crisp might say about sanity; we've both seen their work.

[Fritag]

1 hour ago, Kirk said:

BTW, I'm reasonably sure that the MDC continues around the perimeter of the canopy - I think the idea is to blow the whole thing outwards in pieces rather than just make a hole above the pilots' heads. It's just if you wanted to make the whole thing any more complex it is just about possible.

Ha.  You're a bad man Kirk    I think you're right about the MDC.  But I don't care..............

 

50 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

PPS. Believe nothing Bill or Crisp might say

I'm not sure I'd go that far old chap.  Well p'raps I would.   What do you mean you've been selectively misquoted?

53 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

If you can bung me an output in SVG or uncompressed TIFF let's give this a shot!

PM sent Tony.  ta.

[perdu]

Obviously the answer

 

Ignore the MDC

 

Or...

 

[perdu]

And in this case DO NOT AEROBAT with loose grab bags in the cockpit (or in deference to our late lamented Debs control room/office/cabin/business end/er 'pit))

[Navy Bird]

When I grow up, I want to be @Fritag.

 

Cheers,

Bill

[TheBaron]

Steve rang a few minutes ago and said he's going to be late cycling back from his local Oyster Bar & Spray Tan salon ('Match the Tabasco - it's more than just a slogan!') and asked me to fill in with a few gags...

 

The Silhouette cutter came 'not-quite' close enough to getting a usable result from foil but in the end was defeated by the angled lines. I've got it to cut straight lengths of foil at this thickness in the past no problem, but as you can see, when it comes to cutting  corners so close together the subsequent  rotation of the blade displaces the foil from the backing surface and mangles it:

For reference this was the best surviving section of angles, which contains as you can see too many errors to be of use (here done at slowest speed, least cutting pressure settings:

That was the state of play when I emailed these to Steve a hour or so ago but I still had a nagging feeling from my experience with the Silhouette that it could cut such details at this scale and that the limitations were in the material qualities of the foil (fragile, easily bent/displaced) itself.

So I had a crack with some Oramask and stuck the resulting outline onto some scrap plastic:

There are a couple of lines there slightly narrower than their opposite numbers but as this was cut using the standard 'vinyl' setting in the Silhouette software, I reckon using a slightly stiffer dark vinyl material and a slower cut speed you should be able to eradicate such issues and produce as viable result. Whether the actual thickness of the material is too excessive, you'll be better able to just for yourselves.

Personally I'd be inclined to use  the negative of this as a traditional mask in order to airbrush the MDC outline onto the canopy instead. I haven't exactly made a neat job of applying the mask here but you get the idea....

Oh. One last thing for the eagle-eyed. Any imperfections in shape there result from the rather mediocre 'trace' function in the Sihouette software compared to Steve's beautiful design. I usually find it always requires you to go in manually and adjust angles and curvatures in a few places as it's nowhere near as good as the trace tool in Illustrator (the above result was a quick test without any such editing it should be noted therefore). Using the strandard free version of the Silhouette software I realized it won't actually import SVG files but the paid  'designer' edition does and will therefore render such trace issues redundant as you'll be working from the original design, not a tracing of a TIFF (needing subsequent point/curve adjustments) as was the case here.

 

To summarize:

• I reckon this is a usable process at 1/72 Steve and could be used to produce an Oramask for spraying the MDC onto the canopy.
• The 'designer' version of the Silhouette software would let you work straight from an SVG and therefore eradicate any tracing errors and so streamline such workflows.

 

HTH.

Tony

 

Addenda: Curiosity piqued and sprang for the 'designer' upgrade. Your design imported beautifully as an SVG Steve:

I'm still tinkering with the new software but reckon that an inner line needs to be  replicated outline due to the Silhouette software interpreting your original design as a single linear feature. That should be an easy enough task in a graphics program to simply replicate the original outline and shrink by about 0.5mm or so to produce such an interior shape for the mask...

 

[giemme]

Heck of a fill in, I'd say!  

 

Ciao

[perdu]

Know what?

 

Use the etch, it's fine

 

for interest only I would like to see how the Silhouette copes with this

Just one of the seat canvasses to see how it looks...

 

Not all of them, I have mine all cut out now 

[xffw45343tg]

It's all might, mighty clever, but I don't really understand the thinking behind replacing (2D) photo-etch with (2D) foil. Even when the cutting difficulties have been overcome (you seem nearly there Giorgio) the only advantage that I can see is that the foil version might be self-adhesive and therefore easier to re-position. Surely PE that thin is going to bend and conform to the canopy shape isn't it? Scale thickness of the cord is, what? 0.2mm?

 

All of you lot have FAR more advanced modelling skills than I; can you explain what I'm missing here?

(Other than the perfectly sane and not at all mad desire to own more cool tools).

Edited August 2, 2019 by Kirk

[Fritag]

2 hours ago, TheBaron said:

Steve rang a few minutes ago and said he's going to be late cycling back from his local Oyster Bar & Spray Tan salon ('Match the Tabasco - it's more than just a slogan!') and asked me to fill in with a few gags...

 

Tony......you are soooooo dead.   The whole spray tan thing was supposed to be strictly entre nous!

[perdu]

To be fair Kirk I think someone found an envelope on the bus and wants to see how far they can expand it...Steve we always knew the spray tan was a THING

[xffw45343tg]

Well, I think they're going to have to top 25.55m x 14.4m.

...but that's not important right now.

[Fritag]

51 minutes ago, Kirk said:

I don't really understand the thinking behind replacing (2D) photo-etch with (2D) foil.......

 

Surely PE that thin is going to bend and conform to the canopy shape isn't it? Scale thickness of the cord is, what? 0.2mm?

 

......can you explain what I'm missing here?

 

Not missing owt Kirk 

 

Not sure about the scale thickness of the MDC but my best guess would be c.0.1 to 0.2mm.

 

The PE may be a tad over scale but is not at all bad and I think will look jolly good; and is actually (pleasingly) 3D at those thicknesses, albeit square cross section 

 

I’m also sure it will conform to the canopy, with a bit of annealing if need be.

 

All of which means that I’m very pleased to use it in the build.  And that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I sweated blood to make the darned things 

 

But I am very intrigued by the potential of the silhouette cutter.  Etching is pretty labour intensive and - at least with my inexperience - it is necessary to have several goes to get a decent useable result.  The cutter seems to me to offer an alternative that for some jobs at least gives a more predictable result.

 

Clear as mud?

 

[Fritag]

On 8/1/2019 at 7:57 PM, Navy Bird said:

When I grow up, I want to be @Fritag.

 

 

When I grow up I want to be @Navy Bird

 

Hang on.  Isn’t there a circularity to that which means it’s a paradox which will obliterate us all?

[Fritag]

4 hours ago, TheBaron said:

To summarize:

• I reckon this is a usable process at 1/72 Steve and could be used to produce an Oramask for spraying the MDC onto the canopy.
• The 'designer' version of the Silhouette software would let you work straight from an SVG and therefore eradicate any tracing errors and so streamline such workflows.

That’s a very impressive result, in particular with the ‘negative’ mask.

4 hours ago, TheBaron said:

I'm still tinkering with the new software but reckon that an inner line needs to be  replicated outline due to the Silhouette software interpreting your original design as a single linear feature. That should be an easy enough task in a graphics program to simply replicate the original outline and shrink by about 0.5mm or so to produce such an interior shape for the mask...

 

That is awesome Tony.  Before my next build I’m ‘avin one of them machines.

 

PS: please figure out everything the machine can do before I get one.  I appreciate that may take some time.....but you may have noticed I’m a very slow worker.......

 

Edited August 2, 2019 by Fritag

[Fritag]

1 hour ago, perdu said:

Know what?

 

Use the etch, it's fine

Fine?  FINE?  Since when ‘ave we striven for fine, Bill?