Leatherpro Ak-20 Leather Strap Cutter Spacers

[Anubis78]

Hey everyone,

I am looking into buying a Leatherpro AK-20 Leather Strap Cutting machine.   The vendor says that the spacers that come with the machine are all metric but he can make spacers for me out of PVC pipe.  What's appealing about this machine is that it has a 14" wide cutting capacity, which seems to be the widest that I could find without purchasing an extremely large machine.  Has anyone had any experience with this machine?  Has anyone ever created spacers out of PVC pipe that worked successfully with a strap cutting machine?  Thanks in advance!

-Cameron

[RockyAussie]

I checked out one of these and I think the quick change is excellent and the overall quality looks good as well. I'm not sure about cutting spacers out of pvc pipe as the steel and aluminium ones I have made need to be lathe finished to size to get dead square and to the finish length as well. Holding pvc pipe in a lathe to cut would be hard to do because as the jaws tighten the pipe will distort. A sharp tip will cut in and upset the alignment and a blunt one will give an unreliable cut to size. Aside from those issues I would be concerned about how long they would hold up to wear and tear. With mine I have a heap of thin spacers for adding up to the sizes I want if needed. They go about 1/2mm,1mm,2mm and 3mm and so on.Metric or not it should not matter much. I am sure you will like that wide cut on that machine.

Brian

[nycnycdesign]

Did you ever get the PVC spacers? I spoke with Sergey and he said they worked well but I'm having doubts about their longevity. 

[chrisash]

I dont understand why you need imperial sizes when 5 min on a conversion software you would have all sizes converted from imperial to metric and 0.5 mm is quite a small adjustment size

[Sonydaze]

On 6/27/2017 at 3:18 PM, RockyAussie said:

I checked out one of these and I think the quick change is excellent and the overall quality looks good as well. I'm not sure about cutting spacers out of pvc pipe as the steel and aluminium ones I have made need to be lathe finished to size to get dead square and to the finish length as well. Holding pvc pipe in a lathe to cut would be hard to do because as the jaws tighten the pipe will distort. A sharp tip will cut in and upset the alignment and a blunt one will give an unreliable cut to size. Aside from those issues I would be concerned about how long they would hold up to wear and tear. With mine I have a heap of thin spacers for adding up to the sizes I want if needed. They go about 1/2mm,1mm,2mm and 3mm and so on.Metric or not it should not matter much. I am sure you will like that wide cut on that machine.

Brian

I turn down my worn out round knives to make more thin spacers.  All my spacers are metric but it is no problem to cut imperial sizes by adding smaller spacers together.

[RockyAussie]

Having gotten used to using a 3D printer these days I suspect that it would be possible to print out some spacers quite easily to whatever length wanted. I would think about making the wall thickness a bit bigger than the steel or aluminium ones to perhaps about 5mm or thereabouts. I might just give it a trial sometime soon.