hi
how was your week hi everybody uh this is the is this the first live stream of the new year
yes it is the first live stream of the new year and it's good to see you all again uh i
yeah it's been a few weeks hasn't it um the only thing i'm gonna say about the fact that it's been
a few weeks is that everybody is stressed out and go easy on each other and easy on yourself okay
that out of the way hi it's really great to be back in live streaming again
um and i'm going to take some questions that have been posted by tested patrons
um and there are some spectacular questions today in fact anything i don't get to today
i'm probably well there's a lot that i might not get to today that i'll still answer
uh and we'll seed them out onto the channel um but before i start answering questions um
before i start answering questions i wanted to do a a a little build my last uh oh right i did
the best car yeah right so the last time i did the live stream i did a little best car steel
uh weathering and this is less a build than an instruction and i do precious few instructions uh
because i'm an amateur at almost everything i know how to do and i i don't mind showing
how i do things but i'm always really careful to say this is just the only way i know how to do it
so i don't feel like i can instruct anyone when i only know one way to do something so the things
that i'm gonna like choose to be instructional or teacher-like about are the things in which
not only do i know how to do it but i have a point of view on a whole range of ways to do it
uh and after years and years of doing something that point of view has been honed
into something akin to expertise and that's what i would like to talk about so um a lot of use has
been made of the phrase over the years measure twice cut once and i totally agree with that
it's usually measured three or four times or five times or even one more time just to be sure
but what i wanted to talk about was actually i think the very first maker lesson i ever got from
my dad and it was about cutting through this stuff this is a mat board cardboard if you found a sheet
of this you would you'd call it cardboard everyone would um i call it matboard because it's used
for framing mats or you go to a framing store and they offer you a single or double
beveled mat or whatever that's this cardboard and i don't know if you can see it on camera
but this value is a little bit off-white and this is a pure white usually matte board is colored on
one specific side and this was the sort of first um exotic maker t maker material i had regular
access to this stuff was always in my dad's studio and i remember cutting a piece and getting this
little bit of instruction from him um so to zoom out a little bit makers it's almost like
in the making of things you're almost always drilling a hole or cutting something with a blade
and the blades that i want to talk about today are specifically a matte knife blade an exacto
blade and a single edge razor blade they're all of a piece uh and over the course of
making things you're going to use all of these a whole crap time and when you use one of these
let's say the single edge razor blade to cut through a piece of matte board so let me uh
let me just make a mark here um parallel to the end make a mark in pencil and i want to cut this
mark um oh great hold on i don't want to cut into my baseboard so i want to cut this mark now at
12 11 or 12 years old i was like sitting there with uh under my dad's supervision
i think we were making a building from a ho scale train set that i got for christmas and i
was cutting and i was doing what everyone tries to do i was trying to use this very sharp blade and
this very soft material it struck me that in the contest this would win and i was attempting to end
that contest in one shot it's a long way of saying i was attempting to cut through in one slice and
this is the most key piece of advice i think i've given on this channel in a long time don't ever do
that just full stop don't ever try and cut through in a single slice unless what you're cutting is
newsprint or vellum or something surpassingly thin when you uh when you attempt to cut through in one
slice i'm not going to show a lot of bad examples here um simply because it's going to be hard to
see in super close-up on the camera but oh also i'd like to point out i'm using this beautiful
ruler by alvin i also use uh rulers by see-through um these rulers not only have beautiful
uh inch division gradations on them sorry the rest of the world and the metric system i know
it's ridiculous that we still use standard here but we do but it also has a metal edge for cutting
so that you can run a blade up against it and not slice into the the ruler and that's amazing so um
if you want to make straight nice even balanced cuts and i think that's what you want
every time you're cutting into something just the the first pass should be really light it's just
getting to know the ruler and the material and then successive passes and just keep on going um
the fact is is when you're trying to do it all in one shot you're pushing really hard with this hand
and if you've ever played a musical instrument do you need to do something we're all good okay
um if you've ever learned a musical instrument you've learned that forcing is not good and less
action gives you more subtlety well the same is true in making uh and the same is true for almost
everything whenever you're not getting something and you realize that some part of you is really
clenched or forcing it uh that's when you want to pull back are we almost there no we're still
not there see matte board tends to be fairly dense stuff and it's really unless you're a
professional mat cutter using a professional matte cutter those are two different things
you really don't want to try doing it in one shot yes professional matte cutters do but they
have so much experience and so much practice at this uh and there you have a beautiful cut
i can feel you should just try this yourself i mean if you tried to cut it into one shot okay
let's just give this one shot let's just see if i can i'm going to go to the fresh part of the blade
and i'm going to cut really hard yeah okay so if i feel that right if you do this and you feel
that second cut you will feel the difference between the two cuts this one i can feel is
not perfectly square to the edge which again might not make much of a difference in matte
board but on other things could uh it's not square to the edge it's also wavier i can
feel that this blade under pressure moved it bent uh the same is true with x-acto blades
uh and i'm gonna cut through a host of materials here and just talk about them this is
a matte board um here's a piece of sintra this is foam pvc and this stuff is really great
because you can actually you can do a light cut on it and snap it on the cut can you do that
yeah it'll snap on the cut but that snap ugly ugly as crap right that's no good so you want to
cut through some of this stuff let's uh let's give it a shot with an exacto blade and an x-acto blade
if you're doing fine work with the x-acto blade the first thing that's
going to fail on the x-acto blade is like the top third of a millimeter of your tip
and in model making i swear at ilm i could hear it break every single time uh and that's the business
end you want to be really really gentle with it i'm gonna end up trashing this just to get this
cut but again oh right and because you're forcing it you're pushing down you're also adding all
this other force you're very plausibly going to push your guide ruler out of the way and again
this is all antithetical to your gold which is a nice clean cut and a cleanly cut piece i know
you want to get done in time and i know that blade seems really sharp but give yourself the
extra time just okay we're almost there almost there oh man there we go now let's see here
that's pretty square i have a little that's about two two or three degrees out of true that's my um
that's my bias uh i i i don't cut perfectly straight cuts sometimes um styrene styrene is
another one even super thin styrene and this is uh 0.30 that's 30 thousandths of an inch thick
um for reference a piece of paper is about 4 000 of an inch thick to give you an idea this is uh
about seven and a half sheets of paper worth of thickness and even still i'll use the matte
knife here light cuts and so styrene is one of those these edge cases in which you make a little
score and it bends beautifully on that score um unlike cintra it's fantastic on that regard
but there's going to be lots of times when you're cutting a non-straight shape and when you're doing
that don't try and go through and score it on that same thing again make multiple passes light pass
heavier pass heavier pass and always make sure that this hand the one holding down the ruler
is pushing it down really tightly you wanna i mean i'll actually show you something um this
is my killer cutting ruler this is a a machinist's rule it's 24 plus inches long it's hardened steel
and i use it because it's nice and heavy but when i'm cutting down it i'm literally moving
my hand as i cut in order to maintain the pressure where the knife is up against even
when i'm taking light cuts um thicker styrene is very similar to thin styrene it will also
snap on the score in a beautiful fashion um and you can make lots and lots of nice
strips that way but if uh if you're doing a contour cut and going around a perimeter again
that first light pass will actually guide all your subsequent passes you
don't even need the straight edge anymore if you do it it will just keep guiding you
yeah and again this is what's happening i i i am super impatient as a builder i
want to get done i want to move on to the next things and i don't do well with transitions
but when i stop and just like really let the cut sort of guide my time and
it's not just a philosophy about the cut it's a philosophy about your whole approach to the build
and letting the things are gonna take the proper amount of time take the proper amount of time
all your shop practice stuff will get better uh with that mindset lastly i've got this piece of
leather i bought a gun belt for a costume recently we'll do it as a one-day build
but the gun belt said it was 36 34 inches long and i thought that meant it was for a 34 inch
waist so i thought it would probably fit me no no it turns out that the gun belt is is
34 inches long so it comes to right here so i'm going to extend it with this piece of leather
uh and consequently i'm going to have to cut it and leather is the same thing don't
try and cut through all in one pass and again with leather oh you'll really feel a good sharp
blade you'll feel it working through successive layers it's um funny years ago i found a website
maybe it was on the practical machinist where they were talking about training yourself to feel out
thousands of an inch and they were like take a cut adjust your mill by one thousandth make a second
cut now pull that piece out and feel it feel how much you can feel a one thousandth of an
inch difference because it's real you really can uh and even less than that uh and this is
sort of the same kind of trainings like get used to what it feels like to cut gently um and look
i still try and cut through things quickly oh god i love cutting vegetan leather it's just the best
you will still want to cut things quickly you will still be impatient as i still am but
even more important than the measured to measure twice cut once axiom is don't try and cut through
all the way on the first try when you're holding the blade take your time take several passes
it will be so much better and that's not just about cutting it really is about a whole kind of
mental approach to letting the material guide the amount of time it takes to work with that material
yep the only reason i can speak extemporaneously about this for lengths of time is because i suffer
from all the problems i'm helping you run off at the past i suffer from impatience i suffer from
thinking this has got to go through uh but going back and redoing something you've already done
is one of the things i dislike most in the world so like when i screw something up royally
it often takes me two or three days at least if not a couple months sometimes to come back to a
project and be like all right let's roll up our sleeves and get our heads back into this game
uh so a lot of times when i am recognizing to take the time to do something right i am
really specifically talking to future me and helping future me understand
future me is talking to present me and helping present me understand how taking the time now
will reap great benefits in uh in the beyond place uh all right yeah i think i've said everything i
need to say about cutting twice i will do uh i will do a tool tip about these see-through rulers
when i was a young graphic designer in new york in the 80s um this was the first
tool i spent real money on it was i think these can be 20 bucks and they've always been like 20
or 30 bucks and back when i was 20 man that was i had to think about that kind of expense i had to
really consider it and debate whether it was worth it and i never regretted spending that money on i
have several see-through rulers i have these and alvin ones i have some chinese knockoffs which i
won't advertise because they're blatant rip off of this thing um i didn't realize it until they they
arrived but i'll do a tooltip about see-through rulers because they are freaking fantastic