u/Datadmirable

Very happy with the Vevor Smart 1 cutter

I’ve been really impressed with the Vevor Smart 1 cutter. It is fast, precise, and delivers exactly what I hoped it would. I’ve already been able to make all sorts of projects with it, and for the price, it feels like a very capable machine.

I have moved over to Easy Cut Studio because I find it easier to use than the original software. The only small issue is that Easy Cut Studio does not seem to support a 24-inch mat, so I still use Vevor Exact Cut when I need that size.

The main downside for me is that Vevor does not seem to provide spare pen or cutter holders. I contacted them and was told there was a lack of stock, but I suspect they simply do not really sell them as spare parts. In the end, I had to 3D print some holders and also modify/machine some Cricut-style ones bought from AliExpress.

That said, this does not take away from how good the machine itself is. The blades are standard and easy to find online, which is a big plus. Overall, I’m very happy with it. It is a great cutter, especially if you are happy to tinker a little with accessories.

I’ve been looking for a better way to design boxes and foldable paper/card shapes for a 2D cutter.

The main issue is not the outside cut line. That part is easy. The annoying bit is the fold lines. When you are making a box or any 3D shape from a flat sheet, you don’t want every line to be a full cut. Some lines need to be perforated so the material can bend cleanly without separating completely.

That is where the workflow became painful. I could design everything parametrically in FreeCAD, but after exporting the SVG I still had to open it in Inkscape and manually change some of the lines into dotted/perforated lines. Every time I changed the design, I had to redo that manual step.

I didn’t really want to learn a whole new piece of software just for this, so I made a small FreeCAD macro instead.

Now the sketch name controls the SVG output. For example, cut_outer becomes a solid cut line, while perf_24 or perfp_10_30 becomes a perforated fold line.

So the idea is simple: design the shape parametrically in FreeCAD, mark which lines are cuts and which are folds, then export an SVG that is ready for the cutter.

It turns the old FreeCAD → Inkscape workflow into something that can be done directly from FreeCAD. https://github.com/guillaume52/freecad-vinyl-svg-perforator

Vevor Smart1 - a year on review

Parametric SVG for 2D cutter using FreeCAD