What makes a design cuttable.

The one idea behind every rule

A cut design has to hold itself together as a single piece of steel. Everything below follows from that. The image is not a picture to be reproduced — it is an instruction for where to remove metal, and whatever is left has to survive being cut, coated, packed and hung.

This is why the same file can be perfectly producible at one size and impossible at another. Scale the design down and every line in it gets thinner in millimetres; at some point the thinnest line stops being steel and becomes a tear.

The thresholds we measure against

Minimum metal

Any solid line has to be at least 2.5 mm wide in production. The thinnest line in your artwork sets the smallest size the whole design can be made at.

Minimum gap

Any empty space between two pieces of metal has to be at least 1.8 mm. Tight cross-hatching and near-touching shapes fail here before the lines do.

Free span

The design-specific maximum size is reduced where an unsupported segment would exceed 1200 mm. Long thin spans sag.

Detached pieces

One to three pieces separated from the main body are removed automatically and you are shown a repair image. More than three is a rejection — the file needs revising.

Fragility score

A composite measure of how much of the design is thin and unsupported. Above the threshold the design goes to manual review rather than straight through.

Mounting points

Standoff screws are 4.5 mm across, so the metal at each mounting point needs to be a solid area of at least 6 mm — not a thin line and not a cut edge.

Preparing the file

• PNG or JPG on the upload screen. Transparent pixels are treated as empty space.
• Keep the long side at least 1800 px if you want larger sizes. A useful rule of thumb is roughly one pixel per millimetre of finished product.
• High contrast. The analysis needs to separate metal from empty space cleanly; a soft grey gradient does not describe a cut.
• No need to crop precisely. The engine finds the true bounding box of the metal and calculates the aspect ratio from that.
• If your file is a DXF already drawn at final production size, use the Scaled DXF route and enter its long and short sides for a single-size quote.

How to read the review image

When a design needs attention, the analysis returns your artwork with problem areas marked, so you can see exactly where to thicken a line or open a gap.

Red

Metal too thin at the size being evaluated.

Blue

Gaps too narrow.

Yellow

Pieces detached from the main body.

Green

Segments that are fragile — producible, but the weak points of the piece.

The analysis judges manufacturability and nothing else. It does not score whether a design is attractive, on trend, or likely to sell — that is your job and it is the part we are not qualified to do.

The five fixes that solve most rejections

1. 01
   Thicken the thinnest line

   Find the single thinnest element and widen it. It is usually one detail — a whisker, a serif, a wire — that is holding the whole minimum size hostage.

2. 02
   Bridge floating parts

   A dot over an i, an island inside a letter, a detached eye. Connect it to the body with a deliberate bridge instead of letting the engine delete it.

3. 03
   Open up tight hatching

   Dense parallel lines are the most common gap failure. Fewer, wider lines usually look better in steel anyway.

4. 04
   Simplify at small sizes

   If you want to sell a design small, design a small version. Detail that reads on a 120 cm piece disappears at 40 cm even when it can be cut.

5. 05
   Plan the mounting points

   Make sure there are solid areas where standoffs can bite, distributed sensibly rather than all along one edge.