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Thread: Gaskets With Your Wife's Cricut! - FIXED

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2021
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    Edgewood, WA
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    Gaskets With Your Wife's Cricut! - FIXED

    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!

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    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.

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    Let's load one up!

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    I set the machine to the Poster board setting (the second to the highest thickness) and it sliced that gasket out like butter:

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    (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!
    Last edited by Rick1956; 10-25-2021 at 02:36 PM. Reason: added picture
    I may be old, but I still enjoy the feeling
    of the earth rotating beneath my wheels

  2. #2
    Billy Golightly's Avatar
    Billy Golightly is offline Always finding new and exciting ways to not give a hoot in hell Catch me if you can
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    I've often wondered over the years if you could do this, with one of these machines...very nice. What specific model of machine are you guys using?

    Seems like I remember there was a company that provided a machine like this to some dealers, with a library of gaskets, that they could cut on demand. The name escapes me though...i saw one at 2 different dealers maybe 15 years ago.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jul 2021
    Location
    Edgewood, WA
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    We are using a Cricut Explore Air 2 model. The Cricut Maker series is the one to buy if you want to cut the thicker stuff like cork, but this one seems great for paper gaskets.

    Also, for what it's worth, the only difference between the Air 2 and the newer Air 3 is the ability to cut their patented 'smart materials' which is a non-issue anyway.

    My next tryout (maybe today): I'm going to create a gasket from a picture on the internet, and measure the actual motorcycle part to scale it with.
    I may be old, but I still enjoy the feeling
    of the earth rotating beneath my wheels

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
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    ohio
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    It’s pretty neat the tech that can be had pretty cheap today. I have a 3D printer and I bought some tpu to try and make bowl gaskets with it. And hopefully other rubber parts too
    If its on the internet its got to be true they can't put any lie's on the internet

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2021
    Location
    North Carolina
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    Wife has a Maker... I haven't thought of this, even after the sticker sickness. Sir, thank you for this perspective that I was so blind to in the past! I even have gasket paper less than 5 foot from the machine. No more kits for 2 gaskets!

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
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    ohio
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    I wounder if you could put them on a copier then convert that to something the software would read
    If its on the internet its got to be true they can't put any lie's on the internet

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jul 2021
    Location
    Edgewood, WA
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    That's what I did on the first gasket I did, but it's not quite as easy as 'scan and go'. I guess it depends on how good the scan looks as to how much additional work you need to do to it before cutting on the Cricut.
    I may be old, but I still enjoy the feeling
    of the earth rotating beneath my wheels

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jul 2021
    Location
    Edgewood, WA
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    Gaskets Are Now Coming Out Perfectly-sized

    Well, I have everything figured out with regard to making gaskets on the Cricut. It's a piece o' cake. The real key (after you've scanned your image) is just to make sure that the scanned image is saved at 72 dpi. They all come out sized perfectly!

    I received my new gasket set yesterday and have them all scanned in, so now if I need a gasket I just select the file and load up the Cricut unit, keeping the originals original.

    https://youtu.be/SVZAboHch4A

    I may be old, but I still enjoy the feeling
    of the earth rotating beneath my wheels

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