QUOTE (jfmonod @ Sep 26 2008, 08:44 AM)

Hey. Was away for a bit there. Yeah, you nailed it. Any ideas on cutting "beaver puke" : ) ?
My first problem is actually finding a tangential knife / pen cutting head. My school workshop had a Zund 1200 that we did terrain models on. Man, that thing went all day.
I'm also stuck on what kind of force to put behind it. Do the motors have to get bigger and could you get away with a belt drive ?
At this point I'm assembling / modifying the Solsylva belt drive table (for those who are familiar with the design) in Autodesk Inventor. Pushing a trim router around seems to be rather easy, relatively speaking, but for my application I have zero clue.
Thanks again.
JF
My experience cutting chipboard was with guillotine cutters for simple straight cuts and using dies made from steel rule for complicated cuts. This was about 20 years ago so probably not relevant today.
You can buy cutter knives for Zund and many other plotter brands, you can even buy complete blade holders. (http://www.smp-sign-systems.com/produkte/Plotter_Messer_e.html)
I was unaware of this until I took a wrong turn at a convention center but apparently scrapbooking has gotten way out of hand. There are several low-end diecutting machines like the Cricut, Wishblade, and others. I wonder about buying a replacement blade for one of these units and fitting it on a CNC machine. I suspect the blades are all small, simple drag knives. Maybe that would be enough for most applications, take multiple passes with a small knife.
Better would be to build a tangential cutting head using a stepper motor and a heavier blade
I wouldn't drop from consideration using a small router with a bit similar to what you'd use for circuit board work. That might be the easiest solution even if it's messy.
I thought this site had a nice list of Zund cutting options.
http://www.globalimaginginc.com/equipment_...ing/Tools.shtml