I set up the Cricut for cutting 80 mil styrene. It did not go all that well. With the cutting options available the 80 mil thickness was too much for the machine so I had to finish up using my nibbler. 20 mil should be no issue. 40 mil should be ok also. I am going to try 60 mil. I am also purchasing the deep cut blade to see how well that works versus the knife blade.
Things Cricut needs to do:
1. Allow editing of knife blade material settings (pressure and number of cuts) which one can not do right now.
2. Though this won't make sense to a non Cricut user in order to cut out the window/door spaces one has to 'weld' all the openings together so they stay in the same position for the cut. Once welded one can not un-weld if a mistake in positioning is made. The project has to be deleted and you need to start over again with a new project. This is why I have learned to make copies of the basic cutting project to save all window /door space sizes and positions before I weld.
3. Right now if the basic cutting program does not result in cutting all the way through the styrene Cricut allows one to make one more cut before removing the mat from the machine. Yea you can keep pressing the 'go' button but Cricut should allow you to repeat the entire cut program without having to keep pressing the 'go' button. Note - there is too much wriggle room in loading the mat so if you remove the mat and reload it for another program pass it is virtually impossible to orient it in the same position as before.
One thing I learned after wasting some styrene is that you should always test the cut pattern on card-stock or even regular printer bond paper before committing to styrene.
Below is the styrene taped to the 24 inch mat ready to load into the machine. I forgot to take a photo of the card stock I used to make the cuts.
Below is the result on the card stock setup unit. The bottom window was too low so since I 'welded' the image I had to go back and create a new project to fix the position.
As I said the Cricut could not cut all the way through after even a 24x cut program and even pressing the 'go' button an other 5 times so I resorted to drilling holes and using my nibbler. at least I had the precise boundaries of the cuts visible.
