Using a micrometer to correctly set your Silhouette blade

[BrianP]

I thought I would share this post because I have recently been getting a lot of queries about the best way to set your Silhouette blades.

As many of you know, some of the Silhouette presets can be hit & miss for the media we use in the UK, so I always recommend that people create their own presets, and to do this you really need to know exactly how much blade you need for each material and I've found the best way to do this is to use a micrometer.

Micrometers used to be quite expensive but these days you can pick up a cheap one for less than £10 on Amazon from different sellers such as this one and this one.

Once you have a micrometer, you switch it on, reset it to zero and then clip it on the card you want to cut. This will give you a precise measurement of the card and a better idea of how much blade we need.

Like so...



Once we have the exact thickness of our card, we just need to apply that to our blade. In the example above, the 315 gsm card I want to cut measures 0.34 mm thick. The Silhouette blades move in 0.1 mm increments, so as we need 0.35 mm of blade if we set the blade to 3 then it won't be enough to get all the way through the card, so we round our measurement up to the nearest 0.1, e.g. 0.4 mm. So this tells us we need to set our blade to 4.


Now we know how much blade we need, we can create a preset for cutting this type of card.

To do that we go to the Send tab, click the materials list and add a preset like this:



Once we have our basic preset created we need to do a few test cuts to find the required thickness\force setting. To do this, put some of the card we measured on to the cutting mat and in to the machine, then select the preset we created above from the list of materials and press the Test button. Chances are you will need to increase the force a bit to find the right setting but always test cut at a low setting first because otherwise you can damage the tip of the blade.



If the test cut hasn't gone all the way through the card, increase the force slightly, and then do another test cut like so...



You may need to do a test cut quite a few times until you find the right force setting for your card stock, for most settings this force will be between 15-25, but once you do the test cut will be cleanly cut like this...



So now that we know the card cuts cleanly with the settings we have tested, we can go back to our preset and save those changes we made.



You can now use this preset each time you use this card stock, safe in the knowledge that you will get a nice clean cut without risk of damaging your blade.

This method works for all types of Silhouette blades but the premium blade may need half a turn more than the other blades.