Another new product to announce before @Luke can get to it, the Stingray Drag Knife. You can see it at:
I’m sure there will be more to add to the product page based on the discussion here so if there are any questions, ask away and some combination of @Luke , @wmoy , and @KevBarn14 can jump in with some answers.
This looks a lot (‘allot’ for @Luke :P) like the drag knife we have in our Cricut which we use a fair amount on paper. Definitely of interest here.
Unfair advantage…
@Gerry these are great for large format stuff and with all the updates to the Carbide library’s it has allot of uses.
Hehe! Indeed… I shall allot some resources to purchasing a lot of these, I think!
Teasing you aside - I think you are right! The increased cutting area, and a choice of much better design and driver software than Cricut allows, are both compelling.
Always nice to see the Carbide team come out with something I’ve been…dragging my feet on making myself. 
This looks interesting. I agree that it isn’t a replacement for a dedicated vinyl cutting station, but it does look like it has some legitimate uses.
Is there any idea whether it can cut thicker material like cardboard? Or tougher material like leather? If I could cut leather with this, I would have less need for a laser for future projects. (I mean, I still want a laser.)
One tip for holding down the material would be to get one of the cutting mats that a silhouette uses and hold that down on your work surface. We have the 12"x24" versions for our silhouette. I don’t know if they make larger versions or not.
Those cutting mats are designed with adhesive that holds the work stable, but is easy to remove when finished.
I also wonder how the painter’s tape and CA glue trick would work with tougher material (or that felt that didn’t work for you).
The thickness the Stingray will cut is quite limited.
Ages ago, when I got married, I did the invitations by hand (money was tight, and I figured I was an award-winning graphic designer and aspiring calligrapher) and part of that was an inner envelope. Took one out and measured it and made a file:
envelope.c2d (11.1 KB)
or for the tool definition below:
envelope_8283.c2d (52 KB)
which, if I’d only had a machine back then would have saved my cutting out some 200 of them by hand:
(the actual material used for the invitations was a translucent EDIT: artificial vellum which made for a really nice effect)
For a tool definition, something like to:
should be a good starting point.
Wonderful! I have “build a vinyl cutter attachment” on my todo list, but this looks like a very affordable tidy package that will let me hit the ground running. Going to be picking this and a set of the mc etchers up pretty soon.
Lovely to see this. Mr. Barnett’s video is right on point - it is great to avoid dedicating space to an additional machine, and the Shapeoko setup, while more fidgety, is also more flexible. What type of mat did he use in the video? Self-healing?
That is what it looks like to me. Those are great to have around, and can be had for pretty cheap on amazon. I was thinking of facing off a piece of MDF (probably not needed), adding mounting holes, then using a lot of double stick tape to hold down a cutting mat. That way I can slide it on and off whenever I want and know that it has a solid support base.
That’s a nice pattern - the sort that looks confusing when flat but still creates a meaningful shape.
That much vellum was probably affordable back then in the 16th century when you got married 
it’s pretty pricey nowadays.
It was of course, an artificial material — can’t recall where I picked it up or what the actual product was called — do recall that the scraps melted rather than burned.
Vellum is still available. We bought some from a local supplier to test how difficult or easy it makes calligraphy.
Yes, but 200 pieces of genuine vellum would have been a budget buster.
Would this cut thin veneers?
If they’re paper thin, maybe? I think for veneer we’ll need another product — see if @Luke can be convinced to cook something up?
Excellent and another reason I am glad I went with Shapeoko for my CNC machine. I bought one and can’t wait to give it a try. Enjoying the new features in Create as well. Keep up the great work
Don’t know about the Stingray but the most thin I’ve worked with is 0.2mm. I cut it with 0.5mm end mills without problem using tape/ca work-holding.
That said, I suspect the Stingray could also cut something 0.2mm thick, probably. I’ll try it as soon as I learn how to use it.
This was released at just the right time as I have been looking for a thin cutter solution that’s relatively cheap for some occasional use. One use is for cutting plastic film covering used for my RC planes. It took some work holding experimentation before I got something to work, but attaching the covering to low tack blue tape then taping that on a cutting mat worked well for this small application. The film covering is very thin and it took a while to dial in the correct cutting length and machining speeds, but success! The lettering was cutout using the drag knife and is about 2 inches high.
