Cutting 5mil Laminated Photo Paper - Cameo 5 Alpha
PHOTO OF MY SETTINGS
TLDR: Trying to cut business cards with thick photo paper and 5ml laminate (pretty rigid). Autoblade is about 80% good for the most part with the right settings, but I still have some hiccups. Will aftermarket blades with different angles, or any of the premium/deep cut (2mm)/ (2/3mm) kraft blades work better, especially the 3mm kraft blade (dialed back down so its not so deep of a cut) on carriage 2 (which should produce more force than carriage 1 I believe?)
Hey all.
Just got my Cameo 5 Alpha, and I do love it!. Great cutter, accurate, and much easier than working by hand, really helping to automate my business card making process.
Essentially, I have 300 GSM (around 90-100lb) photo paper, that I laminate with 5mil laminate. They end up being roughly 0.75mm +/- thick. Pretty rigid papers that need to be cut.
For the most part, I can get really good cuts tho! Albeit, I do have some hiccups here and there sometimes. Currently, I only have the Autoblade setup on Carriage 1, using the sticky matt, and my settings usually are these:
Force: 35, Speed: 10, Passes: 10, Blade Depth: 10
Took a while and lots of testing to get the right settings down pat that work about 80% ish of the time. I have the corners get slightly rounded off because I could never get clean sharp corners. But the rounded corners honestly look much better imo!!
However, the main issues I'm having sometimes are as follows:
- Too much force (over 35/36) and the cutter will jam and get stuck to where I have to cancel everything and restart it. Either that, or it gets stuck for a second or two, keeps moving, and then the whole programed route for cutting is off by a lot and I have to restart anyway since itll start cutting in the wrong spots.
- Sometimes the corners of my cards get nicked or hit by the cutter (might be an issue with them peeling up from the adhesive matt), but if I can somehow get my number of passes lower than 10 then that's not an issue since it only happens on 1 or 2 cards towards the end of the 10 passes.
- Even at 10 passes, the blade depth high as possible, and the force as high as possible, some cards (like 1 or 2), will not be cut all the way through and need just a bit of manual slicing with a razor blade to get them to release easily. Nothing crazy, but I'd like em all to be able to be plucked off easily like the majority do. (Always seems to be the one on the bottom left side)
And a few issues here and there that will work themselves out if I can get the speed higher or the number of passes lower. 👍
(An issue I had earlier too, was with registration marks not being read at first due to the high gloss, but using some matte clear highlighter tape over the corner markings fixed that immediately. Thank you to this post.)
Eventually I would love to scale this up to 5 machines running when I need to make bulk cards after printing and laminating, but that's another day in the near future when I get there. 💪😁
So here's my question:
I did some more research and saw that you can get all kinds of different blades! I'm thinking of getting some aftermarket ones from amazon, with different cutting angles (30, 45, and 60 deg).
Would either the...
- Aftermarket Blades
- 2mm Deep Cut Blade (or 2mm Manual Blade - think those are the same)
- 2mm Kraft Blade or 3mm Kraft Blade
- Premium Blade
...fix my issues to give me consistent cuts all the way through, with no jamming or getting stuck due to too much force? Theres not much info or videos out on a lot of the accessories or other cutting blades it seems.
I read online that the Carriage 2, for the 3mm Kraft Blade, and etc - produces more force. So maybe that blade on that carriage, dialed back on the depth so its not so deep, would be good to produce more force and cuts with less passes? That or maybe just a deeper blade on Carriage one will let me do less passes? Idk. :P
Hoping someone with more experience can point me in the right direction. I don't mind buying all these to try em out either.
Thanks!
