Silhouette help...please?

And try this method. I bet it may be closer to what you are needing: LINK

I think I read something like this -- maybe what you are thinking of doing -- it was in the Silhouette School blog when she was talking about saving vinyl -- she was cutting the inside out of a heart ... cutting through the vinyl background intentionally ....
It is also pretty recent because she was going a valentine design ...

I don't do much with advanced cutting/cut by color. I will have to go give this a try.... It almost seems like she is leaving out a step during the cutting!

I will report back!

OK - I tried it without doing the print & cut - just setting up two sets of line to cut differently. As long as you don't have to change the blade, it worked perfect!

I drew my outside rectangle and set the line color to blue. That is my deep cut. I put a shape inside the rectangle. It already has the red line, so I did nothing to the line color.

I opened up my cut settings window and selected Advanced. Make sure you have "LINE COLOR" selected - so that shows. On the blue line I selected cardstock. I bumped up my thickness a little because I am using glossy photo sticker paper and it is a little thicker.

I selected the red line layer and chose the white sticker paper - but I had to back the thickness down a bit, because with the blade at 2, it was cutting all the way through. But once I had my cut settings right - it worked great.

I can post some more in depth instructions with screen shots if you need? You aren't a member of any of the Silhouette groups on Facebook are you? It is SO much easier to post screenshots and help on the FB boards.

I have to leave for a few hours - but I will try to get you some screen shots posted here this evening! They will help make more sense of it.

I am super glad you posted this. I feel like I learned how to do something new today!

 I started out with a set of stickers that already have cut lines around them.  I did some test cutting on my sticker paper to figure out the right settings.  Since the blade never changes - I needed to figure out what thickness setting were best for each cut - the one that went all the way through, and the "kiss cut".  I was using a thicker glossy photo type sticker paper, so your settings will probaby be different.

 I also set up my Print & Cut page.  

The default line around the sticker is already red - so I do not assign a line color to that....

I then used the rectangle tool and drew a box around my sticker set.  While the rectangle was still selected - I chose the line color tool, and then changed the line color to blue



I replicated the stickers/box so my page was filled as I wanted with them.  Now open the cut style window.  Click on ADVANCED to open up the advanced cutting settings.  Make sure you have "line color" selected so that part shows below it.  

See the blue and red boxes - those correspond to the lines around the stickers (red) and the rectangle (blue).  Make sure they have check marks in them.  No check mark - no cut.  



Now you want to set the cuts for those particular colors. I first chose the blue, that is the part that will cut all the way through.  I set it to cardstock.  I adjusted my thickness to 30.  The blade in the machine is manually set on 2.  The software will show 3 - but it doesn't matter what the software says (you can change it to 2  here if you want).  



No I will go back and choose the RED settings.  I want this to be the kiss cut on the circles.  I chose White Sticker Paper as my media type.  I backed off the thickness on this one to 8 because I was cutting all the way through my paper with the default settings.  

Now you have your settings all right - hit Send to Silhouette and it will read the registration marks and then start cutting.  Mine first cut the blue rectangles and then went back and kiss cut the circles.  They came out perfect.  

@devildog - here is a screenshot.

1. Click on Material Type (the expanded cut menu doesn't show until you do this)
2. Scroll down to LINE SEGMENT OVERCUT and select ON.
3. Extend your Start and End settings to 0.1

Maybe that will fix your frayed cut!

@devildog You could double check that there is not a break in the line... zoom in really close on the screen to see if there is a break in the line.



How did you create the box? With the rectangle tool? Or with the line draw tool?

To check to see if there are any nodes not connected (a break in the line). Use the EDIT POINTS tool - I have it highlighted in yellow here.  If your shapes are grouped, ungroup it, or the nodes will not show...

See how the box on the left has no red dots. The only nodes are the gray ones at each corner.  Those nodes tell the machine to change direction of the cut.  Click on the box (ungrouped from anything) so it has a selection/bounding box around and then select thet EDIT POINTS tool..




In this example, on the box on the right - I made a cut in the line.  Where that cut/break in the line is I now have a red dot.  This shows that there is a break in the line. The machine picks up and doesn't cut that very tiny spot.  That would cause a break in your cut, although very tiny, it would leave it connected just a bit.  

 
In this screen shot I zoomed WAY in to show that little tiny line break, where the red dot is in the image above this one.  
Here 

You can zoom in and click on that red dot and drag it up to where the line starts above it and they should connect....

Or, you can just make sure you draw a simple box without any breaks using the rectangle tool (there is a rounded one and a square one.

I am not 100% sure if this is why your cuts were bad in that one spot - but it sounds like that is the likely case.