My new toy arrived Friday. After watching a clip about the Cricut Explore on Trainmasters TV, I had to have one, but was willing to wait for a sale to materialize. Sadly, Michael’s coupons explicitly state the large discounts cannot be used on Cricut products, otherwise one of those 40% or 50% coupons would have come in most handy.

With the advent of the Cricut Explore Air (the Bluetooth-equipped version), a minor discount has been applied to the regular Explore on Amazon. At $200, I have great hopes for this device. My initial thoughts of use were focused on the homes and structures surrounding the railroad, I have since been contemplating the manufacture of rolling stock, even locomotive cabs.

Once I get the unit set up, it will take some time to play with and understand its capabilities and limitations. First and foremost, I want to find out if the system registers to the sheet product to be cut, such that one piece can be removed and re-inserted, with the cutter aligning itself to the sheet’s edges and designating the same point home (0,0). After that, I’ll be looking for ways to manipulate the cut depth within the same sketch, with the intent of making scribe and score cuts within an image which also designates full depth cuts.

The toy will, unfortunately, wait. The next two months will be consumed by a significant amount of overtime, as an important test program gets underway at work. I will be working on my layout plan in the meantime, as that requires a pencil, paper and reading historical literature from time to time.