Hi all,
My wife does a lot of crafty/creative stuff. We thought it would be fun to have a Cricut cutter, so we bought one about a month ago. We weren't sure exactly what we were going to do with it, but were pretty sure we would be at least making stencils and printing vinyl designs. Anyway, I was looking at a gasket out in my shop a couple weeks ago when the notion hit me, "I wonder if the Cricut could cut gasket paper?" Well, once that started bouncing around in my brain I couldn't turn it off. The Cricut has lots of material thickness settings, so I would think one of them would cut gasket paper. I grabbed a gasket out of my pile and went into the house.
I scanned it into the computer (regular old flatbed printer/scanner), then I cleaned up the edges in Photoshop. Cricut machines can get easily overwhelmed by 'frayed' edges instead of nice, clean cut lines. After all, they are basically home-use CNC machines, so they try to cut whatever the program is telling them--whether correct or not. I opened the Cricut software and started creating the new test project, and when I imported my scanned image I realized it wasn't scaled right. The image was a lot bigger than its actual size. Unfortunately, Cricut software only lets you resize the working 'box' your image is in, so you can't just measure between two holes somewhere on your gasket for scale. (I hope they include that feature in the future versions!) I didn't have any gasket paper yet anyway, so I didn't bother getting it real exact at this point--I just wanted to test it out. I loaded a piece of regular old card stock into the machine, hit the 'go' button, and held my breath.
Success! The first result was a little off on the sizing, but after I gave the dimensions another tiny tweak, viola (pronounced wah-lah)--A perfectly-sized gasket! Well, a gasket wannabe anyway. I'd say it looks almost good enough to use!
Of course, you can buy gasket paper at many auto parts and hardware stores, but it's usually priced like anywhere from 6.95 to 12.95 for a couple square foot pieces of material. I browsed around on the web found a 25-yard roll for $22 on clearance from the Pep Boys Ebay store. Now I can experiment! I opened my image in Photoshop again just to verify the dimensions, and they were perfect, but for some reason it came into the Cricut software a lot bigger. It could be a setting I missed. Anyway, after some trial and error I went with a tip I got from Youtube: Just place the real gasket on the Cricut mat (trying not to stick it, haha) and noting the dimensions of an imaginary rectangular boundary around your gasket. Now make the dimensions of the onscreen bounding box match those dimensions the best you can. The mat dimensioning is made to match the machine, so it gets you pretty close!
The next test was to test the cutting capability of the machine versus the gasket material. I mic'd the gasket paper and came up somewhere around the .020", which is real close to most of my Honda gaskets. I cut a few pieces off the roll of material to play with, wondering if I was going to have trouble flattening it out, but it wasn't bad at all. Instead of having to steam it or something I just rolled the cut pieces backwards a bit to straighten them out then just let them sit and relax. The tackiness of the Cricut mat held it down easily.
Let's load one up!
I set the machine to the Poster board setting (the second to the highest thickness) and it sliced that gasket out like butter:
(By the way, the blank rectangle below the gasket was originally a ruler I included in one of my scans when I was experimenting with my scaling options. And yes, I know it's a huge gasket--I was just trying things out.)
The Cricut seems like a potential life-saver. There are tons of times people need another gasket after breaking one at midnight, or they're working on something obsolete and there are no such gasket left in the world. All a person potentially needs is an item to scan into a .jpg that a Cricut can import. Maybe it can be it a picture on the web, an advertisement, or even of the surface of the part you need the gasket for itself! Also, there are Cricut machines that will cut thicker materials than ours will, so you might check into those.
Apologies on the image posting... Apparently, I'm too new to post the thumbnail attachments or something...? I wasn't about to post full-size images in the post itself, so I did it this way to make it more readable. At least there are pictures!
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