All About the Blades: How to Calibrate the Knife Blade

Whenever you install a new knife blade, it is important to calibrate it before using it with your Cricut Maker. It only takes a few steps to calibrate the blade, let me walk you through it.

Calibrating your Cricut Maker blades is important because it ensures you’re getting the best cut with your machine.  Even brand new blades need to be calibrated, thankfully it’s a fairly simple process and it doesn’t take too long to do.

To begin, click on the burger menu in the upper left-hand corner in DesignSpace:

Click on Calibration from the menu:

From here, you’ll be able to pick if you want to calibrate the Rotary Blade, the Knife Blade or Print Then Cuts.  In this case, click on Knife Blade:

Install your knife blade into your Cricut Maker’s Clamp B and lock it in place. Place a piece of printer paper in the upper left-hand corner of your LightGrip (blue) cutting mat as shown in the illustration.

Note: Typically you use the purple StrongGrip mat when cutting with the Knife Blade and thicker materials, but you’ll want to use the LightGrip mat for calibration so you can get the piece of printer paper off the mat when you’re done doing the test.  Printer paper is delicate so it may stick too much to the StrongGrip mat.  Also, don’t worry, cutting paper with your knife blade, while not recommended for normal cutting, will not harm the blade.  Printer paper is so thin, it won’t damage your blade to use it during test cuts.  Once you have your paper and mat ready, click Continue:

To load your cutting mat into your machine, slide the mat between the mat guides.  Butt the mat against the roller bar.  Hold the mat with one hand and press the Load button with the other.  The Load button is a double ended arrow on the right of the machine.  The machine will pull the cutting mat into the machine: Once you have your mat properly loaded, press the flashing Go button on the machine.  Tip: The Go button has the Cricut logo on it.

Select the best pair from the drop down menu, then click Continue:

DesignSpace will confirm that the calibration is complete. Click Close:

Make sure to follow these steps each time you install a new knife blade to ensure the best cuts possible!  If your cuts are starting to turn out poor, try calibrating your blade before replacing, it may just save you from replacing a blade earlier than needed!

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