Cutting fabrics

[avsfan733]

Has anyone had any experience with creating a cutting head to cut such fabrics as kevlar/carbon fiber on their personal mills? I do a lot of carbon work on my kart, as well as my cars and the Racer I am involved with at my university. Being able to custom cut the pieces to an exact pattern would save all sorts of time as well as improve QC and consistency

[HuFlungDung]

I don't know the details of the design, but I've seen video of workers in clothing factories cutting a stack of cloth 3 or 4 inches high like.....butter. They had some kind of a counterbalanced "coping saw" they just steered around by hand. It was amazing how fast it cut.

[avsfan733]

Well the extent of my knowledge of the things are this:

A F1 team called arrows closed down and auctioned off all their stuff last year, and included was something labeled as a "CNC cloth cutter". It looked exactly like a 3 axis gantry CNC, but im guessing it really didn't do much up and down. The idea is really neat to me and I was wondering if anyone else was familiar with these devices.

[buscht]

I just noticed this thread. Check out this site
http://www.carlsondesign.com/#Plotter_Cutters

Not only is it a fabric cutter, but a pretty cool CNC machine.

It looks like he uses some sort of swivel knife similar to what sign makers have for cutting vinyl.

Here's a link to a guy who has developed a cutter and shows you how to do it.

http://www.cuttingedgecnc.com/vinyl.htm

T