SLO Sail and Canvas' Carlson Plotter CP-101

This is our Carlson Plotter, model number CP-101 cutting 1500 denier-per-inch(warp) Pentex-X Ply for a Nacra 5.7 mainsail and then PSA polyester for sail numbers. You can see the cutting wheel moving over the fabric. This CNC machine cuts single ply of most textile materials at rates of up to 12" per second. This machine is at our manufacturing facility in San Luis Obispo, CA and is primarily used for precision sailboat sail cutting.

[@raifhanna1120]

I am wondering how is the machine knows the direction of the blade???

[@karldeardorff2620]

The blade (z-axis as we call it) is driven by a stepper motor. On this particular, quite antiquated machine, the actual blade trails the path from behind the axis of the motor. You can think of it like the motor sort-of driving the blade, and the blade also follows along. This makes for nice smooth curves, and when the blade lifts you can make sharp corners. This is how Calson did their older machines. Basically all modern machines have the blade axis centered on the driven z-axis and the z-axis motor turns the blade actively. Depending on the math used to drive 'z' this is much smoother on some machines vs. others. Our new machine from Autometrix has a very smooth z. This particular machine in the video uses stepper motors with no encoders. What this means is that the motors actually don't know where they are, all they do is count steps from a given zero point. If it looses a step, then it doesn't know where it is, it also doesn't know it missed a step, so this can cause problems if too many steps are missed. In general on stepper machines you'll want to drive the machine at conservative speeds such that you don't miss steps. Servo motor powered machines will have encoders and will 'know' where they are, but they are also more expensive than stepper machines. I hope this makes sense. The Carlson machine in the video is from circa 1996, the newer machines are all so much better, but this machine did cut many hundreds of sails.