Last weekend I started drawing the walls for two more buildings, the first to go digital is the Toronto Carpet Building 7. It was ready to start cutting the cores out this weekend. After a trip to Credit Valley on Saturday to pick up more 0.030″ styrene sheet, today it was on to the cutting process.



Cutting the first of the 8 cuts today, and nearing the end as the walls start to take shape into the evening.
The first thing I learned today, is that the Critut software is buggy. I hate Cloud Based Software, call me old school if you want, but software actually installed on your system means it should work, even if you don’t always have the newest feature. After well over an hours frustration, I finally got back into the application. Once in, I started setting up he cuts, because of the height of the walls, and the layering to create depth before adding brick, I neede six sheets of 12”x24” 0.030” styrene. I don’t need the whole sheets, but needed more than half of them all, but the unused parts are plenty big for other layout buildings, no waste from that at least. What was wasted was a 12”x18” piece where the sheet didn’t load in the Cricut right, and I didn’t notice, it wound up making a mess of the sheet, and cutting through the cutting mat. It seems, when the Cricut loaded the mat, it misaligned and thought the material was in a different location.
With the layers, three of the four walls have 4 layers to the core, and the last has 3 layers. The 4th layer is just for the ground floor, and I had a scaling issue with them, where they didn’t align properly. Fortunately, these were the smallest parts of the day, and recutting them only took 20 minutes or so to figure out what the right size should be, set up and cut. All in all, I ran 8 cuts today, as everything was simple shapes, they were reasonably fast cuts, the longest run was about 1:45. The Cricut doesn’t cut all the way through 0.030” sheet, but at most a single score down the cuts is enough to get window openings out, larger seams just fold and snap like cutting large sheets of styrene.

Cores for Toronto Carpet “Building 7” cut out and ready for cleanup and assembly, the left 3 walls have four layers, the right most, only 3!
Now I really need to get onto doing the CAD work for the windows and doors for this building! That will be my next step, drawing, having them 3D printed and casting. Fortunately, this building is only 51 windows and doors…though there are 12 different window size/patterns and two unique doors…