Can the Cricut Maker 5 REALLY Cut As Thick As They Say?

Cricut just released their new Maker 5. I'm gonna be putting this machine to the test. So this one may be a bust. That's a no. It sounded like I was about to tear up our machine. Oh, this definitely needed the knife blade. I'm impressed. I can't say that I'm not impressed. I am impressed. Shut the front door, hold everything, because y'all, Cricut just released their new Maker 5, and we are here to put that machine to the test. Y'all, we just went, picked up this bad boy right here. Let me go ahead and pull you down here so that you can see it as well. But y'all, look at this sleek new machine that we just got today. It is Friday, September the 4th, and Cricut just released their new machine. Y'all, you've already seen our first impressions. You've already seen the things that we think we like about it, but in today's video, I'm gonna be putting this machine to the test. Now, one of the biggest new features about this Maker 5 cutting machine is the fact that the clearance went from 2.4 millimeters to the larger three millimeter clearance here on this bar. So I have lots of new materials that I'm going to be testing out to see if we can cut it on this machine. I have some foam board over here. I have some corrugated plastic. I have some really thick cork that I'm gonna try to cut, and I'm gonna see how well this machine cuts leather. So if you are ready to see this machine cut some really thick materials, make sure you stick around with me. Now, before we dive in and actually start cutting on this machine, my name is Lauren and I'm a craft producer here at Makers Gonna Learn, where we strive to bring you inspiration, education, and motivation to get your die cutting machine out and to start crafting. And y'all, today, we're gonna be putting this one through the test. So let's go ahead and let me just bring you over here and show you all of the materials that I got for us to cut on this machine. So starting off strong, we have some foam board. Now, I went to Michael's this morning to pick this up, and then I was walking around, looking at everything that they had, thinking, what is thick that I could cut? And this popped out at me. Y'all, I've been wanting to cut foam board on a Cricut for a long time. So I picked up this 11 by 14 foam board, and let me just go ahead and get this opened up so that we can take a look at it. Now, the first thing that I wanna do is I wanna test, is this going to fit underneath that roller bar? Because it didn't give me an actual thickness of how thick this material was. So fingers crossed, it looked like it was gonna fit. So let's just go ahead and bring it over here. Now, this may be the first mistake. This one does look to be a little bit thick. Let me see if I can move these star wheels over, if that is going to help at all with going underneath here. So I'm just moving my, mm, okay, hold up. It looks like it's going, not easily. So this one may be a bust, but you know, I'm just testing it out. We're gonna see really what this thing will do. So we will test this one out. Not sure how that's gonna go. The next material that I got is this corrugated craft board. Now, this came out of the poster section, and I am going to have to cut this because it is very large. Now, I saw where Angie Holden, shout out to Angie Holden, where she did cut this material on her Maker 5, so I do have hope that this one will cut. Okay, so I'm trying to cut down this corrugated plastic, and I'm just gonna be real honest. It's not easy to cut as is. I'm really curious to see how well we think that this Maker 5 is gonna cut this corrugated plastic, because like I said, it ain't easy cutting it by hand. Now, I will say it is easier with this true control knife versus the scissors, but let me go ahead and get this cut down. So let's test this one out over here at the beautiful new Maker 5. Is this gonna fit underneath this? Yes. Now, this one fits under a lot easier than that craft foam, so maybe the craft foam that I got was a little too thick. Anyway, we'll test. So we have corrugated plastic. We have our craft foam here. Now, I did also get some cork board. This is another one where I'm just like, ah, maybe it's too thick. Maybe it's not. I don't know, so let's go ahead and give it a little test, see if it's going to roll underneath that bar. Here is the thickness of the cork. You can see there. Who knows? Let's see. Oh. Now, this one is a little long, so I might have to trim this one down. Okay. I'm also afraid that this cork is not gonna work. So it can cut thicker material, but it's still, I really thought that this one would go under there, but it's not looking like it will. Anyway, our last material that I did get, and I will say, I was guessing at these materials because this one, nowhere on here does it tell me the thickness. Who knows? But the last one that we're gonna test is going to be this. It's a leather craft cut. This is Art Mines brand. It is two square feet. It's definitely gonna be thin enough. That's a thin, not a super thin leather, number one. It's a genuine leather. But this, we are definitely not gonna have a problem fitting under there. So now that we've kind of checked all of our materials, like I said, some of them may work, some of them may not, but let's go ahead and hop over into Design Space and let's get everything set up that we are going to cut on different mats so that we can test them all at the same time. Now, I do want to preface this with, I plan on using my knife blade for all of these materials. I don't think that any material that I have on this table would work well with a fine point blade. So we are gonna be using this adaptive tool. This is the knife blade here. We're gonna be using it in our new Maker 5, but let's go ahead and hop over to Design Space and let's get everything set up. So now that we are here in Design Space, let's go ahead and get some things on our canvas to start trying to cut on this new Maker 5. So I'm gonna come over here to the upload section. Now, everything that we're gonna be using is going to be a Maker's Gonna Learn file. So I'm going to bring in this oval frame. I wanna try this one with both the corrugated plastic and the foam board. I'm gonna manipulate this file just a little bit, so just bear with me. And then the second one that I am going to upload, I'm going to upload a little image of these ghosts, and we're gonna try this one with the leather and the cork. I'm gonna contour some of these out, and we're gonna use one of these for the leather and the cork, just because I think it would be super cute. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to choose which one I want to cut out, and I think I wanna do this one up here. So I am going to ungroup all of these, and I'm just gonna delete out the ones that I don't need. So I'm going to delete all of these out, and then this is the one that I'm going to try to cut the leather and the cork out of. Now, I'm gonna make it just a little bit smaller, right around four and a half by four and a half, not too big, but not too large. Now, this one here, I want to cut this frame out of either the craft foam or the corrugated plastic, but once again, it all comes in grouped together, so I'm going to ungroup it, and I'm actually just going to be getting rid of that purple layer, and then I'm going to be getting rid of the cream layer so that we have this, and I'm gonna make this a little bit smaller, just so that the frame has a little bit more room, and I can come back in and decorate this frame a little bit more. So after I have this set, I'm just going to select both of these and slice, and I'm gonna get rid of that middle portion. So this is the frame that I'm going to be trying to cut out of the corrugated plastic and the craft foam board. Now, this is a five and a half by around seven and a half inch frame. I think that is large enough to give it plenty of room to work and not too small. The only thing with a knife blade is you can't get things too small because it doesn't do as well with the little tiny details, but I wanted to give it enough detail to see how well it does. So what we're gonna do now, I'm gonna come over here to the make it screen. I'm gonna do this on the mat. It's gonna be on a 12 by 12 mat. I'm going to actually duplicate. So I have two of each of these, two ghosts and two frames, but I'm gonna move these two different mats. So I'm gonna create a new mat. Let's just say we'll do this color for the leather. We'll have this one for the cork, and then we'll just change these, move this one to a new mat for green. Really doesn't matter what color. This is just so that we can kind of keep things separate. So I wanna start with a win personally. So we're gonna start with a corrugated plastic. Okay, so now that everything is set up in design space, I have my mats here kind of prepped. I have my corrugated plastic here. Now I did grab a 12 by 24 inch mat just because this piece of corrugated plastic was longer than the 12 by 12. Anyway, I put this one on a 12 by 24. You can cut it down for a 12 by 12. I have my leather on a mat, and then I have my craft foam here on a mat. Not really, still not sure if this is gonna work, but we're gonna test it. But I'm going to start out with my corrugated plastic because I'm really excited about this material. And we're going to be cutting one of the frames. So let me just bring you over here. We are going to start out with this mat here. You can see we have our frame. Now I am going to bring this frame over toward the middle just a little bit because I am doing this more toward the middle of the mat. Then we're gonna click done. Now I am going to browse all material. And then up here at the top, I'm going to type in corrugated, and we're gonna be doing the corrugated plastic three millimeter. Now that is going to allow us, that's going to tell us that we need to use the knife blade. So coming back over here to our machine, I am going to take the fine point blade out of clamp A here. And then we are going to put our knife blade into clamp A. And then we're gonna clamp this down. And then all we have to do now, and I am gonna have to move you because it's a long mat. Let's just go ahead, put you right there. And we are going to load this bad boy in. And we are just going to allow this to cut. Okay, so it's currently doing multiple passes. I'm really curious as to like how this actually cuts. I'm still not really, I don't know. We'll see. Okay, so you all know as a rule of thumb here on the Makers Gonna Learn channel, what do we do if we don't know if it's gonna cut through? We always check our cuts. So what I'm doing now, I'm actually, because this is a little further over and I want to see if it cut through the back. Oh no, I accidentally pulled this out. I don't think that it's cut all the way through. So what I'm gonna do now, I'm actually going to hit play again. Oh, okay. So where I accidentally pulled it out, it's not cutting in the same spot. So let's just go ahead and unload it. We may have to try this again. Because it did not cut all the way through. So let me bring you over here. Let's just take a look. So here is the front. Do y'all see where it cut here? But it didn't cut through all the way to the back. But I will say, it is pretty easy. If you have a simple design, it's pretty easy to pop it out. Okay. And this material does hold up pretty well to kind of being manhandled a little bit. So did it cut all the way through the first time? No, it didn't. And this may be something that I have to test multiple times. What ended up happening is when I went to check my cuts, I was a little rough with the mat and was trying to like put my hand behind here and I accidentally pulled it out. And you can kind of see right here because I pulled it out like the Cricut. Maybe you can't see. There's like a really faint line here where it wasn't lined up, which is the importance of not unloading your mat because when you load it back, it's not gonna be in the same spot. Anyway, it cut through. And actually after the first time, all I had to do was pop it through the rest. So it's not bad. It actually pretty crisp if you ask me. Look at that, let's see. Can you see that? Not bad at all. I'm honestly fairly impressed. So the corrugated plastic, it did great. So let's go ahead and move on to our craft board. Now, this is one that I really honestly, like I don't even know if it's gonna fit. So I think for my cut settings, because when you come back over here to Cricut Design Space and we go to browse all material and let's just say I type in craft foam. This is not the same craft foam. This is more of a craft board and craft board is not in there. But I would think that it would be similar size to the corrugated plastic. So I'm going to go back to this corrugated plastic and use the knife blade again. And we're going to try it on this cut setting first, but let's just come back over here. I'm going to be doing the second frame. So let's just, number one, see if we can get this bad boy loaded in here. Once again, I don't have my calipers. They're not, the battery's dead on them. So I don't know the thickness of this material, but we're gonna try it. Fingers crossed. Nope, nope, nope. Okay, that's a no. It sounded like I was about to tear up our machine and Lord knows I can't be doing that literally the very first day we get it. So this, my friends, is too thick. This foam board is too thick, my friends. It's a little bit thicker than that three millimeters. That doesn't work. And honestly, with that being said, I don't even know that the cork that I got is going to fit. Here's the thickness of the board that would not go through and there's the thickness of the cork. So if the foam's not gonna go through, the cork is not gonna go through. So I guess I'm not even gonna try that in this video. That just means you're gonna have to come back. I'm gonna have to go find more materials to cut. But we do know that it will cut through this and it did pretty good. So let's go ahead and test out our leather as well. I'm just gonna keep it the same frame. Why not? I was gonna do a little ghost, but maybe a cute little leather frame would be cute. Anyway, I will say that this is some pretty thick leather. It's not three millimeters thick, so it's definitely gonna go through there. But I'm curious as to what cut setting and how well the Cricut's still gonna cut it. So I think that I am going to go with, so when I type in leather, just come over here and I'll show you. When I type in leather, you have your genuine leather here, and then you have tooling leather down here. Now, I would personally think that this would be closer to the six to seven ounce tooling leather, but I do want to look at material settings as well. So when we look at genuine leather, we have the fine point blade pressure setting of 270 with two passes. That does not seem like this leather is definitely not gonna cut through with a fine point blade. But let's go down here to where it says tooling leather, and it has fine point blade, deep point blade, and knife blade. Hmm, let's just go ahead and start with the tooling leather and see how well it does with the tooling leather, because this is some pretty thick stuff. So let's go to browse all material. Let's go back to tooling, and we'll select this one with the knife blade. And then we're gonna bring it back over here, and we're just gonna see how well this cuts with this knife blade. Oh, this definitely needed the knife blade. That's like barely cut through right there. Okay, so we're currently on pass number four of eight. I'm curious to see. I don't want to mess up the cuts, but I am really curious to see if it's... I almost still think it has a little bit left. Now, one thing I do want to say, tooling leather is something that you have been able to cut on your maker for a while. This is not necessarily new, but I am curious to see how well this does cut. So far, I am pretty impressed with the corrugated plastic. I hate that the core and the foam board is just a tad too thick. I really, really can't wait to find some more thick materials that we can use and also engrave. Now, in this video, I'm not gonna be engraving with the Maker 5, but I do have a really cool acrylic blank here that we'll probably be doing a video here coming up very soon on engraving with your Cricut Maker 5 because they also gave us a brand new engraving tool, which is really, really interesting to me. So let's just give this a little bit more time to cut through, and we'll see how crisp and clean it is at the end. Okay, so we are finally done, but one thing that I wanna show you that is kind of new to Cricut, it is now, Cricut Design Space is now telling us that we need to check our cuts and that if it is not cut all the way through and we need to cut more to press the play button. So let's go ahead and come over here. Let's check these cuts because I am curious to see if we need to hit cut more. Well, part of me feels like maybe it did, and I actually think I just moved the mat. So let's try to see if we can hit play again. At least it's cutting in the same spot and I didn't move the mat. So we're gonna let it cut just a little bit more. Okay, so it's finished, but if you want me to be honest, I can't even really tell if it did or it didn't cut after that second little extra pass. So I'm just gonna unload it and we're gonna see. And you all are gonna see firsthand how well it does with these super thick materials. Okay. I don't know y'all, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I'm impressed. I can't say that I'm not impressed. I am impressed. I do think that it did really, really well with this tooling leather. You can see, you know, it's fairly thick. There are some little strings around there, but I will say I am a tad bit disappointed that my craft foam board did not go through there. I really thought of all things that we would be able to cut some craft foam board, still not there yet, but this corrugated plastic did cut through really, really well. So tell me in the comments, what do you think? Does it cut any thicker than what you initially thought? Does it not cut any thicker? Is it, do you think that the thickness of what you can cut is a big enough advantage for you to upgrade your machines? Definitely sound off in the chat what your thoughts are, what you think. I still want to use this machine a little bit more before I give you my full like true thoughts, but so far I am very impressed. I love the upgrade on this clearance. Although it's not a ton, this thing still cuts super fast like our Maker 4 and our Cricut Explore 5. So, so far I really, really enjoy it. Once again, let me know in the chat what your thoughts are. And if you've stuck around this long and you're not part of the Maker's Gonna Learn family, definitely check out that first link down below. We have our trial membership going on right now where you can try us out for a dollar. Y'all, it's just $1. What you're gonna get, seven days unlimited access to our website, which is going to include 20 download credits, whether you want to download 20 cut files, 20 fonts, whatever you may choose, and you are going to get credits to try out our new Maker Studio tools where you can generate your own Cricut Ready SVGs, PNGs. You can convert PNG designs super easily into SVGs in our studio tools, as well as our background remover tools. So if you haven't checked that out, make sure you check us out. Try us out for a dollar. And if you haven't already, hit that thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel, and hit that bell notification so that you can be notified every single time we get crafty. So thank you guys so much for being here. I'm definitely gonna be doing a lot more with this Maker 5 and thick materials, but first impressions, pretty impressed. Thank you guys so much for being here. We'll see you guys in the next one. Bye, guys.