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Personally I buy most of my stuff through USC. Hard to beat the prices and the Oracal/Orafol vinyl is awesome and is about 2 days to my door. I do occasionally buy local. I'm sure there is a sign supply shop somewhere near you. Most will sell cast vinyl by the yard. A note about the 24" height on the large letters if I understood that right. Size of graphic can be controlled at the point of sale. As you gain experience some of that experience is in sales. I steer my clients or potential clients in the direction that makes my job easier. In the case of the large lettering I would offhand mention that the letters will be cut from a 24" roll and be about 22" tall. If they are set on them being 24" and make that point then you get into a conversation about wider 30" vinyl and additional cost due to waste or if your cutter is maxed out you have a conversation about tiled work. Either way you can get a little more $$ if you feel you need it. I rarely find a job that has any single string of text graphic that won't fit on a 24" roll. You DO want to pay attention when you figure it all out to just how much waste you will have. Some designs are JUST large enough that they end up too large for a 15" roll but waste a lot of a 24" wide roll. You also want to plan on messing a few up and I always add a mistake factor into most of my work so I have some extra $$ just in case and a bonus if all goes well. You CAN layer smaller app tape on wider jobs but it's not a great idea. You'll often find a row of bubbles that develop all along the overlap. If you are getting into wider signage you will probably want to find and use some sort of app tape installer. I use the Big Squeegee Cut Vinyl Tool. Works great once you learn how to use it. There are several other options. Wide and long tape applications are challenging. I have taped off items over 20 ft long several time and do it on my 8ft long dinning room table. Never happen without my Big Squeegee, its amazing.

Have you checked around your area to see if there is local vinyl shop that sells to the public? I have one here in NC that is like 15 mins from me. I like going there because if someone orders a color I know I'm not going to use again, I do not have to buy a whole roll of that ugly/crazy color. Prices at my local shop are not to bad. Also if I need something printed on 3M I can get that done there too crazy cheap if I do the artwork. Just a thought.

HDS cannot be 24" tall, because your effective cutting width on 24" vinyl is just around 23" (routinely, I design anyting for 24" vinyl at 22.5", and if I need larger, I'll jump right to 30" vinyl which gives me 28.5" width to work with, or 29" if I really must). Same thing for the other words, you cannot have 8" letters, and then stack them like that -- the math doesn't work. You have to allow a fraction of an inch between the words, and then a slight margin at the edges of the vinyl. You better have tracking dialed-in perfectly if you want to have less than 1/2" on each side of the vinyl for margins.

No, why would you do that? Just reduce the vertical heights on everything a teensy bit. Nobody is going to look at these decals and notice a slight 1" reduction in height. What possible reason do you have to avoid making that 1" adjustment? This is a big sign, six feet long and three feet tall. One inch less won't be a problem.

L+W 2 That is the formula I still use for RTA. 24 + 24 = 48 \2 = $24 for the stacked words. 24 + 46 = 70\2 = $35 for HDS. (RTA is Ready To Apply decals --- although the 3 words require some finesse for the customer to apply, as you noted, so that's another story, but yes, it is a standard practice to nest objects together to save material, and then arrange them onto your substrate individually later) Overlapping transfer tape is a terrible idea. (creates bubbles when applying)

Totally forgot to mention ... There was a kiosk at one of the local malls here (hahaha ... I live on an island, they are all local), ANYWAY - they were charging $1/inch, based on whatever the longest side was. Those prices were from about 10-years ago and the kiosk is long gone. But based on those prices, that's about $120 right there. Slice is right, but you can still get the HDS at 24" if you're going to cut it from a roll and just do one letter at a time, and it would need to be installed individually. I would totally cut the HDS separately, especially if it's going to be a self install.

Black and White are the only two colors in 651 that can come in matte. Q1: Matte is typically easier to read because there's no glare. Q2: If they want glossy gold, but matte black, give them what they want. The customer is (most of the time) always right - whether they have bad taste or bad sense or not. Different strokes for different folks (and whatnot). Q2a: I'm not sure what you were planning on charging them in the first place, but if you charge them enough that covers the cost of your materials then you're ahead of the game - buy some rolls of the vinyl that you need, for the size that they're looking for, and you get to keep the rest on the roll. I'm a hobbyist and do a commercial project now and then. Sometimes I just charge for the materials of a new color, and smidge more for the app tape and my time. If have the color in-stock, then I just charge them whatever I would normally do - with exceptions for family, friends, and difficult customers. Know your hard cost and go from there. There isn't a commercial job that I will do that will ever be under 0.05 per square inch <- That'd be my wholesale price. Q3: Matte might need a higher tac app tape than the gloss. Depending on the size of your existing app tape, you do not necessarily need to buy bigger tape, just overlap the edges of the tape until it's all taped up ... unless you're cutting huge and only have a 6" roll, then save yourself time and buy bigger. Q4: You don't state what machine you have, so if tracks well, then you can do the black in one shot. If it doesn't track well, then you might want to cut the words separately and use blue tape on the wall/glass for alignment. This is just one girl's opinion on it, and I'm sure others have differing opinions on what to use, how to use it, and how much to charge.

Think about this, vinyl costs pennies, compared to all the extra work and time lining things up. Use 651 Matte black My2c

Paper tape is WAY better.

Yeah, it was my fault that they decided on 24" tall letters. I could have easily said 23" was the max and they wouldn't have cared. They just wanted really big letters. I'll know better next time. Still not sure if I'm going to just make them smaller, or end up turning them 90 degrees and cutting them separate. Either way... I'm going to get some wider transfer paper. I want to try the paper stuff anyways.

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I would like to say that I am so jealous that y'all have access to very competitive prices for vinyl. I think the prices here are much more inflated, due to the fact that it's too costly to bring the vinyl in, unless you're willing to buy a pallet worth of it. Most of the materials here are probably twice the cost

I'm definitely going to call them now because it happened again! I wasn't that worried about the first time and figured it was a one-time thing, but wanted people to know to check their order just in case. Well, lo and behold, I got another job over the weekend with an oddball color so I ordered 5 full rolls plus 2 yards of the oddball color. The 2 yards again came in two pieces, 55 and 24 inches.