So I work mainly with glass. Cutting glass, especially borosilicate, can get tiring… I wanted to see if I could come up with a simple solution using my X-Carve. Turns out, i made a pretty good glass cutting bit, the rotation sadly, is a bit large, so you need to give an inch overlap to your scores. I wonder how difficult it would be to control the direction of the head with a motor and some programming, that would make this the perfect cheap glass cutting tool. I also want to add a spring to the cutter, between the collar and bearing. one you can adjust the stiffness of, so you always have a consistently pressure on the score. This was my first attempt, and it works pretty well if I pay attention, I have been making svg files of parallel lines, and letting it go, then an svg of another direction etc. its time consuming, but much less than doing it by hand. I will be tweaking it until i can get consistently perfect cuts. Hope I can. Let me know if you want the list of materials used to make it.
Neat!
So for the rotation does it work like a regular drag knife? Using those extra pivots to swivel the blade?
Are you manually making those (because of the grater length needed) or are you using one of the drag knife plug ins? (inkscape or VCarve)
Awesome SeanAugustineMarch! Any chance you could post a video of it in action?
Would this work better for you? Adjustable springs, should fit your existing machine, etc. You just need to score not actually cut right? Diamond Drag Engraving Bit for CNC Machines - Use Your CNC Machine to Engrave Metal, Plastic, Glass, and Granite - WidgetWorks Unlimited
The bearings let the direction turn the cutting wheel, which is a few millimeters behind the center of pivot. in the direction of the score. its not perfect yet, I’d like it to swivel to the correct direction in a shorter distance. but im sort of limited to the size of the Toyo heavy duty cutting head.
Sadly, that expensive bit does not score glass… they say it will do what a glass cutter will do, but it absolutely does not. it only etches, which does not help cleave like a score in glass does…
Where did your glass cutter head come from? And it would be really cool to see how you chip away the glass from the outside of that curve. This is very interesting to me but I have no experience with glass (not good experience anyway… more like shattering, blood, etc.)
Last weekend I picked up a basic glass cutter for some picture frames and started wondering if glass could be cut somehow in the xcarve. It’s really interesting to see your solution. Being able to accurately cut/score glass opens up a lot of really interesting design possibilities. Neat stuff.
It changed my world. As i wrk mainly with glass, this saves sooooo much time. Now i am not running it as i would for routing other materials in one continuous pattern mind you, i am actually manually controlling with universal gcode sender, as i am doing lots of straight cuts. If i can figure a setup where I can pause between steps, then I can really save an insane amount of time. Right now a 2 day job takes me 2 hours, im sure i could bring that down to one hour with the right pathways and pausing features, so i can move the glass between scores.
Did all these cuts from multiple 19" discs in 1 hr
Its a toyo heavy duty head, i figured all the dimensions and found aluminum tubing that perfectly screwed onto it, the rest was cake, as all the parts except the cutting head were from Servocity.com