ShaneGreen

For everyone that uses a separate computer to run your cutter, how do you transfer the cut files from your design computer? usb thumbnail, LAN? Do you keep the main copy of the image on your design computer and just put a temporary copy on a thumbnail and delete it after?

Not only does the pattern repeat, but it only moves up and to the left. Like it doesn't know to go down or right. Does it do it all in one fluid movement or is it pausing a lot? ( like where it should be cutting the other two sides of the weedbox or the second half of a letter)

VinylMaster's YouTube page has a ton of extremely helpful videos. I've sat and watched them all with a notepad in front of me so I can take notes and document how far into which video something is found. Warning, the videos and the HELP are for all versions and usually don't tell you which version something is found in. However, since you have PRO nearly all of it will apply to you.

We bought 3 of the Sheldon Cooper plastic ones for about $17 or $18 a piece two years ago. They work great and it's really not worth the hassle of making your own. A good quality one will work for tens of thousands of shirts. The cheep ones are around $10 and they give out pretty quick.

It looks like the one on my LP2. Can you manually push down on the carriage and it touches the vinyl? It is spring loaded and with just a little pressure should be able to touch the vinyl. Is it marking the vinyl at all or does the blade not touch? Google Translate..... ¿Puedes empujar manualmente hacia abajo el carro y toca el vinilo? Está cargado de resorte y con solo un poco de presión debe poder tocar el vinilo. ¿Está marcando el vinilo o la hoja no toca?

UPDATE - Went into Lowes last night and they had these kind of lumber racks as part of their pallets of Christmas presents. So they are a one-time buy usually. Still had a ton left so they had marked them down to $26. Judging from the weight of the box I think they are going to be pretty heavy duty.

Windex has ammonia in it and that will mess with the vinyl and adhesive if it hasn't completely been removed. Wash it down with soapy water. Dawn dishsoap cuts the ammonia well.

I've watched a hundred videos, read tutorials, searched the forum, yet I can't seem to figure out how to properly add extra weed lines. As an example, lets say I'm cutting out a really detailed image in VinylMaster Cut. I've added a weed box to the image with "Objects > Add A weed box". I find after trying to weed the first one that if I ever want to cut it again I need to add a weed line from the green circle to the blue star. And then add weed lines from the objects to the weed box. So I need to add the three red lines shown. I've tried to use the line drawing tool, but can't seem to make the end nodes snap to the existing objects. So when it cuts the new lines either A) the lines don't connect to the object or B ) they slice into the circle and star. I have "Arrange > Snap To > All" checked, but there doesn't seem to be any snapping taking place. What am I missing here?

VinylMaster, I appreciate the CUT specific videos and have been back rewatching them this week. While I haven't run across any of the CUT specific help files, I'm sure when I do I'll be grateful for them. Wildgoose, forgive me if I stirred up trouble, that was not my intent. I was trying to point out that by not specifying which functions went with which version, the videos and help files were making it more difficult to adopt the software and leaving new users very frustrated. I'm going to wander back over to my cluttered corner and go back to figuring out how to manipulate all these pretty little drawings. . .

The first cord I tried on my LP2 had problems. Luckily, I had an 6 footer laying around with ferrite beads on both ends. That did the trick. The ferrite beads, those big lumps of plastic a couple of inches from the end, cut down on stray high frequency noise in the lines. Most of the time when talking about "data loss" the data is still there but other "noise" is making it unusable. Like Mz Skeeter pointed out, the lower end units have cheap chip sets and they probably don't have the capability to filter out the noise. - Use the shortest cord you can get by with. - Make sure it has ferrite beads on both ends. - Keep it away from electric cords. Cross electric cords at a 45 degree angle or larger. Never bundle the two together. - Test it in different USB ports on your computer. Not all the ports are the same. - USB cables are one place not to pinch pennies. Bargain cords often have thinner wire and less shielding = data loss. I've got two 25 foot USBs stretched from my porch out across my yard to a megatree for my Christmas light show. They criss-cross dozens of power cords and terminate in a control box with two power supplies, two micro controllers, 16 relays and 45 Amps of power. . .an EMF nightmare. The data arrives just fine, as long as I follow the guidelines.

Love the "FORTIFIED WITH BUTTER" sign at the lower left. You know, just in case the nurse with the defibrillator didn't get the point across we have a subtle reminder.

Mz Skeeter - It will add a weedbox around the outside. It also has an "Auto Speed-Weed" setting, but it seldom adds anything but text weeding. As VinylMaster says, it looks like the options to do any advanced weeding require the PRO version. The "easy lift-marks" and "perforations" shown in that article aren't available on this version either even though it's an article for "Cut". Slice&Dice - Thanks for the description of why it won't work. That helped clear up the reasoning. VinylMaster - I appreciate you being active on the forums and the sheer amount of instructional information your company puts out there. That being said, your help files are extremely frustrating to use. Why in the world do your instructions not specify which features are available on which software?!?! I am an Engineer who has spent nearly 15 years in manufacturing and the last 15 in application development, so I've read thousands of manuals, tech briefs and sales sheets and have only come across this a handful of times. Combined instruction manuals are nothing new, but they almost always have some sort of icon showing you which version of the product has this feature. It makes for a great subliminal sales tool, each time I look for help I'm told all the benefits of upgrading. Instead, VinylMaster has opted for a "figure it out for yourself" approach that leaves me scratching my head wondering if I'm doing it wrong or if that feature isn't available to me. Before asking this question I went to the help manual and read the entry "Speed and Weed Boxes." Instead of "here is what Cut can do and look what you can do if you upgrade to PRO," I spent 20 minutes trying to find commands and double-clicks that don't exist in my version. I walked away from my desk completely frustrated and wondering how long it would take to install SignBlazer.

The LPII has an endstop at both ends and yes, it's green on my unit. I just checked and mine will make the "test" cut from the cutter's control panel even without the usb cord plugged in. Try unplugging the usb and turn it back on and see if you can run the test cut from the cutter's control panel. If it still doesn't cut, then we can rule out the USB/computer as the problem.

Some of the Oracal 951 metallics sure look like they boarder on glitter. Not "look at my new bass boat" glittery, but they are awful sparkly.

Northern Illinois. A little farm town called Seneca. There were a lot of tiny communities nearby with Nordic type names like; Stavanger, Norway, Kinsman, etc. I don't recall any of them actually having churches or steeples like that, though. I saw them in pictures, books and such.

That style steeple is used by a lot of Nordic cultures. We had a strong Norwegian and Swedish population where I grew up and though there weren't any churches like that in the area, I remember seeing them in pictures on their walls. The extremely steep roof is common in those regions too, to shed snow loads.

Thanks Primal. Centurytel internet and it's been a mess for over a week now. Today I'm getting partially loaded pages, if they load at all. Took ten minutes just to load half that page, so I couldn't see any of that information. Uggggg. . . .done venting for now. I return you to your regularly scheduled forum.

Love this idea! Grizzly Tools has them here in the US for $27 and has 12 bars. I think you can order additional bars, but my internet connection sucks right now. http://www.grizzly.com/products/Lumber-Rack-6-Shelf-System/T27630

I used own a powdercoat shop and was surprised to find that a good outdoor vinyl would hold up fine in the oven. I didn't have a cutter at the time and a local sign shop cut me a number of flames out of scrap he had. A couple things to watch: - very thin pieces may start to curl up in the oven. Make your designs chunky. - The adhesive can be hard to get off. I was doing ghost flames so I had to do a first coat with the decal on, remove the decal and do a second coat. If there is any residue left the powder will flake off when it's baked. - Watch for hotspots in your oven. The vinyl will shrink a little and a hot spot will make it shrink a lot and possibly curl. My oven was 4x4x6ft and I had to use the fan to keep the heat even enough for the vinyl to not curl.

I had never run across doing a reverse image search on Google. Don't know how I've missed that. I'll sure be using it a lot in the future. Thanks! I used to deal with copyrights quite a bit as a database programmer/web developer where I worked with a couple of famous photographers. They don't mess around when it comes to protecting their images. The clipart world seems to be a bit more complicated and shady. The first image I did a reverse search on shows up on the University of Southern Florida's educational clipart database and they offer a commercial licenses. It's also on dozens of free clipart sights with varying degrees of licenses. The image itself has been used by the national park service for at least 20 years, but probably closer to 40. So it's probably safe to assume that most of these "licenses" aren't legitimate. It makes it pretty difficult to use any image you haven't created yourself.

MZ Skeeter, did you just happen to know that was a copyrighted image or are you using some sort of software to check them? I've noticed that people point out copyrighted material a lot on this forum (which is a good thing!), but not sure how they know. Curious, for two reasons; 1) I was given a bunch of images that are suppose to be copyright free, but I can't verify them. 2) I've come across images that are up for sale as copyrighted material but are also available for free downloads and I don't know which they are.

The "wheel/feet things" are the pinch rollers. They hold the vinyl down against the grit rollers . . . these are the wheels that actually move the vinyl front-to-back. As Mz Skeeter pointed out, be sure the pinch rollers are on top of the grit rollers. I believe the Titan2 has white boxes just above the pinch rollers that indicate where the pinch rollers are. Imagine what happens when one of the pinch rollers is out of place and holding the vinyl against the cutter bed instead of the grit roller....the vinyl won't want to move in that area. And the grit roller that should be moving the vinyl now has no pressure against it, so it can't move the vinyl where it should. You'll have a cattywampus mess in a hurry.

What if you were doing decals for a whole team and you wanted to change out "Alex #69"? I know you could just delete that line of text and write a new one, or save it as a new image. But what if you're expecting to have to print replacements of these in the future (helmets, stock car doors, livestock gates, things that get abused a lot). Is there a way to hide "Alex #69" in VinylMaster Cut and add "Sally #43" and then hide her and add "James #007"? In most graphics or cad packages you would do each different name in a layer and turn off the ones you don't want to be seen, but I don't see an option like that in VM.

Hi Brian, I bought the LPII education bundle recently and I'm pretty happy with it. It came with a nice starter assortment of all the misc. stuff that can add up fast. "The Cut Media Educational Kit - w/ LaserPoint II Vinyl Cutter" As for the sound, are you old enough to remember dot-matrix printers? The high speed, wide carriage dot-matrix printers used stepper motors and sounded a lot like these cutters. It's a high pitched whine with occasional crunching.... a dot-matrix played over an old school dial-up modem. I wouldn't want to be on the phone when it's cutting, but other than that it's just another annoying office noise.

I had a small powder coating business that I lost to a fire. Did a lot of sandblasting and everything they have said above is true. I also can't stress enough how important controlling the dust is! Silicosis is a very serious issue. - Most tractor supply type companies carry a handful of different grits and have good prices. - Always watch for moisture in your grit. If it gets damp it's useless and nearly impossible to dry out. - If you like to tinker, look into building a pressure pot. A siphon uses most of your air volume sucking up the grit. A pressure put pushes the grit to the gun with just a small amount of air, so the majority of your CFM can be used for blasting. They can be difficult to get dialed in right at first, but they are incredible once you're over the learning curve. - Really spend some time pretending to use a cabinet before you buy one. I found all the arm holes were too close together and five minutes using one would kill my back. So I built my own with multiple arm holes set to different widths. I could blast a whole motorcycle frame without ever opening the door. Some of them I tried wouldn't let you reach in far enough to manipulate the item you were blasting. - Any time you're dealing with fine dust (sandblast, drywall, finish sanding) a "Dust Deputy" from Oneida is worth it's weight in gold. It's a simple cyclonic separator that really does it's job. I added an exhaust port of pvc to my cabinet and ran it to the Dust Deputy and then to a shop vac. Before hand, the shop vac filter had to be cleaned every 15 minutes. Afterwards I could run 5 hours or more.