ZING! its a V2

Overseer

Western Thunderer
While frustrated due to lack of modelling space and time, my business invested in a piece of equipment which could be useful for certain types of model building. It is a KNK Zing cutter, similar to a Silhouette but heavier duty. I have been doing a few trials to see what it can do. Basically I am testing to see if it can produce acceptable panelling for carriage building in styrene as an alternative to cutting and filing the mouldings out by hand. The construction method is exactly following David Jenkinson's method. This is to be a GWR V2 four wheel passenger brake van in 7mm.

It looks like this (the mouse on the left end is not part of it).
V2 KNKZ.jpg
And cuts like this -
V2 zcut.jpg
After cutting out the panelling is fixed to another sheet of styrene, in this case the mouldings are 0.25mm thick and the next layer is 0.5mm thick. I haven't cut the 0.5 with the cutter yet. The V2 has only a few windows so no problem cutting them by hand. A print of the cad drawing is in the photo below with the part finished sides and ends.
V2 bits.jpg
V2 close.jpg
I had a problem with the sheet slipping for the last few cuts but decided to fix it and finish it. I am still working out how to get exactly the outcome I want. At present it is possibly a bit less accurate than cutting by hand but much quicker and repeatable. The V2 parts took less than 30 minutes to cut.

I have also tried a few other carriages, an 1850s four wheeler and an 1870s American bogie carriage, both in 1:48. These are 3 layers of 0.25, all cut on the Zing, laminated together to provide the relief detail.
V2 amergee.jpg
V2 amer.jpg
All the sides will be assembled on substantial styrene carcases to provide strength.

So far it is working pretty much as hoped. There are some tweaks to the way I have produced the drawings which I want to try to improve the output, and lots of changes to speed and pressure of cut to be fiddled with.
 

Ian@StEnochs

Western Thunderer
Looks interesting. But some of the internal corners look a wee bit rough or is that just my screen? Can you tell us what actually does the cutting please? Is it a blade or what?
Ian.
 

Dog Star

Western Thunderer
Fraser,

Mike Trice has been experimenting in a similar manner and his results are available Over There. I recall that Mike found that cutting the corners of the beading was difficult because of the blade thickness / width... the resulting curve was displaced horizontally from the correct position (where the side was cut with the side parallel to the long axis of the machine). Agreed that Mike was working in 4mm scale and maybe the effect is reduced in 7mm scale. Sorry, I cannot remember how Mike got round this feature.
 

Overseer

Western Thunderer
Looks interesting. But some of the internal corners look a wee bit rough or is that just my screen? Can you tell us what actually does the cutting please? Is it a blade or what?
Ian.
I am using one of the blades available for the machine, it is a small angled blade like the tip of a scalpel which pivots. There are varying offsets to suit the different blades, eg. zero offset for the diamond point, 0.25 for this blade. I haven't got to the bottom of exactly how the offsets affect the line locations, the discrepancies seem to be to do with the rotation of the blade.

There is some roughness at some of the corners due to each line being cut as a separate stroke - it depends which way the blade is facing from its previous cut for its exact position within 0.5mm or so. I have drawn the artwork in AutoCAD using the fillet with radius tool to form the curves between the straight lines, then printed to a vector PDF file which is imported into the Make-the-cut software which drives the cutter. Combining the individual line segments into poly lines will make the cutter cut the whole shape in one cut instead of lifting the blade. There are quite a few different ways of getting the artwork into the cutter and the first few goes had some quite unexpected results. I am still working on getting exactly what I want out of the machine and working out what can go wrong. So far it does seem capable of working to the accuracy we need, it just needs to be told what to do in the right way. There is also lots of control over the speed of cut, force used and number of strokes in each cut which I haven't completely tested yet.
 

Ian@StEnochs

Western Thunderer
Thank you for that explanation. It always takes time and patience to find how to work with a new tool. Please keep us informed as to how you get on but the machine certainly looks to have potential.

Ian.
 
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