jeff g

I have a problem with the free domain names and hosting. Also with the GoDaddy's of the world offering $9.99/year domain names. Basically my problem with them is this. THEY own your domain name...you don't. ICANN is the ONLY domain registrar and they work through Network Solutions. When you register a domain name through GoDaddy or Globat or whoever, they register your name with Network Solutions for 99 years...that's how they get the price to you down to $9.99/year. Here are a couple of really big issues with that business model: You miss a renewal. They sell your domain name to someone else. They go out of business. You just lost your domain name when the year is up. They own it...you don't Personally, I have all of my domain names registered with Network Solutions. It costs me a little more (I pay in 5 year blocks, so it's $20.00 per year), but I am the SOLE owner of my domain names unless I decide to let them go. As for hosting, I use Globat.com. They offer the most bang for the buck in terms of space and bandwidth from what I have been able to find. I've been with them for the past 4 or 5 years and I have had great results. They also keep upgrading my service in terms of space and bandwidth for $49.00 a shot. They do this about once a year. The last time though, it bit them in the butt. They upgraded me to 3 terabytes of online storage and 3 terabytes of bandwidth per month. I called them up and cancelled my other 2 hosting accounts and combined my 3 domain names into the main account and 2 sub accounts. They went from getting $300.00/year from me to $100.00/year and $89.00 as a 1 shot deal for the upgrade and the 2 setup fees for the sub accounts. Works for me...I'll give them $89.00 once and keep $200.00/year ;D If any of you folks decide to host with Globat.com, please tell them that 3cyl.com referred you. It gets me free service if 3 people sign up.

One of the many reasons that I hate USB. On my main computer, I used to occasionally use a USB external hard drive. When I plugged it in, everything else USB in my computer STOPPED working. I finally quit using it and bought a network drive enclosure and transferred the hard drive from the USB drive to the network drive enclosure and haven't regretted it a bit. The "U" in USB stands for universal. Just remember that universal means that it will do everything...but nothing well. :-[

Should have kept my mouth shut about that. I got called out, spent 7 hours working in the rain and some idiot almost hit my truck while I was in the bucket 25 feet in the air...He/she ran over my safety cones. I mean, seriously, how do you not see a big white truck with yellow strobe lights, red 4 way flashers, and 3 safety cones behind it. They got all 3 of my cones with their car, missed the truck by less than a foot, and didn't even slow down > I just looked in Sign Blazer and saw the warp text option. Looks to be a lot easier than Powerpoint. I still have to get a mouse for my laptop though, to make it easier to use. :-[

I had some time today (haven't been called out for work yet) so I decided to play around with the Pcut and some various software that I have and design a nice sticker. I still have some fine details to work out and I don't have the "right" color vinyl yet, but here is the basic sticker in rough draft form. It doesn't work license plate size (I can't weed the small letters) so I made it a 10 inch diameter sticker for the back window of a truck (or a trailer sticker). They'll be giveaways at vintage Japanese bike meets. The "K" will be green, I have to center the Yamaha logo a little better, and I will capitalize the S and F in "2 strokes forever". I may change that text though...I haven't decided yet. The graphic was created using MS Powerpoint 2007 for the lettered ring and I used Inkscape to put the graphics in place and scale it all. Then I used Vector Magic to convert it to a .eps file to import into Signblazer. The whole thing took about 20 minutes to create once I figured out how to create the curved text in Powerpoint. I cut out the whole thing in blue vinyl (doesn't show up very well in the pic) and then took a piece of red and told Signblazer to cut out just the "S" and did the same with the Yamaha logo in black. I peeled the S off and stuck it in place of the blue S and cut and taped the black Yamaha logo in place of the blue one.

I'm actually only on call 1 week every 7 months, so it's tolerable. Since I really don't celebrate Christmas, it's no big personal issue to cover so that the other guys can be with their families for the holidays. It'll come around eventually if I need to trade a day off. Hopefully my vinyl order comes in early next week. UPS has a bad habit of holding ground shipments until the last day that they say they will deliver the package. Then I get 2 phone calls saying that they can't find my house. 3 day shipping typically takes 8 or 9 days with UPS or FedEX.

OK...I spent an hour or so tonight playing with MS Paint, Vector Magic and some old T-shirt graphics I created for some previous motorcycle meets. I've come up with a really cool license plate (if you are an old 2 stroke motorcycle fanatic like me...valves are for toilets ). It'll be 3 or 4 color, depending on what I decide I like, with graphics and text. I'll post images after the New Year. I still don't have the vinyl I ordered and I'm on call at work from tomorrow until the day after Christmas. I'm 1/2 Jewish and the Christian 1/2 of my family is in Tennessee. Since I'm in Pennsylvania, I took the on call duties for the Christmas holiday, so I probably won't have any time to play with the Pcut until late next week. The pay is good, but being on call at my job plays hell with the fun stuff in life. I originally purchased my Pcut to use as a plotter so that I could make sheet metal patterns. It was significantly less expensive than a wide format printer. It's worked flawlessly for that from day one because the program I use for the sheet metal patterns saves files directly as EPS format. Doing anything else with the Pcut has frustrated the hell out me since I've been trying to use the wrong software to create or modify my graphics. With the help and hints that I've gotten from this board, my Pcut is now a LOT less frustrating to use and I'd like to thank all of those have offered hints and given assistance. Please step up to the virtual bar...I'm buying this round. :wreath: Merry Christmas :xmas tree: Jeff

Me too.

I have a pretty good eye for centering things up, but I decided that since I'm going to be making some club license plates for some of the motorcycle groups that I belong to, it would make things easier with a template. The template also helps with the placement of the graphics so I don't put a sticker over the holes in the plate blank. So, I spent a half hour with signblazer, a ruler, a license plate blank, a real license plate, and my Pcut. Would have been 15 minutes, but I don't have a spare mouse to use with my laptop and the touchpad is a pain for any kind of fine work...lots of deleting went on. A mouse for the laptop is on my list of things to buy tonight at Wal-mart when I stop by to get my car battery warrantied. Anyway, I came up with a template for cutting graphics for license plates. The overall measurements are that of a blank plastic license plate and the hole spacing is matched to a real Pennsylvania license plate. The hole spacing isn't 100% perfect, but when matched to the PA plate, it's only off by a few thousandths of an inch. Good enough for a sticker template. http://www.3cyl.com/jeff/license_template.SBD One word of caution about using the template. Match it up to your blanks before you design and place stuff close to the holes. I bought 5 blanks and they apparently came from 2 different lots or sources. The hole spacing is drastically different among the 5. That is the reason I used a PA plate instead of a blank plate to determine the hole spacing. Ken, put this in the appropriate place if this is not the appropriate forum for it. license_template.SBD license_template.SBD

OK...where is the smiley for banging your head on the keyboard?!?!? In the last hour, I've found that Signblazer actually IS a graphics program, vectormagic can be my friend, and I've been beating my head against a wall thinking that I had to phart around with Photoshop to create my graphics...I hate that program. Thank you all for the help and the insights. I'm going to bed now...have to be at work in 8 hours. Thanks again, Jeff

That worked like a champ :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: I took your .eps and put it straight into Signblazer and cut it several times. Stretched, scaled, and original. Looks GREAT with NO distortion. Thank you !!!!! When my green vinyl shows up, I'll scrap my "K" and use yours if you don't mind. What software do I need to get to be able to convert to a vector file so that I don't have to bug everyone with requests?

Thanks, That may have been waht was screwing me up all along. I'll try it in Signblazer and see what happens. I know that we all have our strong points and I've been reading all the posts and trying to do the best I can. Graphics just isn't one of my abilities. I can build a high performance 2 stroke motor that will hold together forever, I can fix MS Windows from command line, and I think that if I really tried, I could network AT&T's computer system to a Buick, but graphics and graphic software just beat the crap out of me.

First off, I have the artistic ability of roadkill...I can't draw a straight line without a ruler and I've been asked to stop singing at a church service. :notsure: Anyway, I came up with a sticker design and a license plate design for a couple of the motorcycle groups I belong to and they both beat me up trying to get them to work. :lol: I downloaded a couple of logos from brandsoftheworld.com and tried to scale them up to cut. Didn't work for me. Maybe I just don't have the right software, but I tried with Adobe Photoshop 7. They scaled OK, but wouldn't vectorize worth a damn. They would look good on the screen until I blew them up to full scale and then I could see all sorts of rough edges or totally distorted lines. The Pcut did it's job beautifully, though...it cut the full size logos EXACTLY like they were shown in full size. Totally useless stuff and I wasted a LOT of vinyl trying to get some nice graphics. I've been playing with these on and off for a couple of months. Text and hand created stuff cut fine, but these graphics have been beating me up. Today I had a few hours to play with, so I blew the logos up and then with MS Paint and pixel by pixel, I fixed the edges and then saved them as monochrome .bmp files. They vectorized just fine and I got my designs to cut AND look good in the process...something that has been eluding me for a while. I think, with my limited graphic abilities, I think I'm going to stick with straight text stickers, graphics that I create myself, and my pipe patterns. This is a helmet/bike sticker I created for one of the groups I belong to ... Suzuki Two-stroke Owners Group International. It's red, even though it shows up as orange in the picture. I made one in black also and it looks great against a chrome fender. http://www.3cyl.com/jeff/plate1.jpg[/img] Here is a license plate that I made. The "K" logo gave me a LOT of trouble getting it to cut correctly. The logo I downloaded wouldn't scale smoothly. Took an hour with MS Paint to get it to almost work to my satisfaction. It's still a little rough...I'll be working on that. I will be peeling off the blue "K" and replacing it with a green "K" as soon as my green vinyl shows up and I get it perfect. I'm going to make up a couple each of these plates with the Kawasaki logo (green), the Suzuki logo(red), and the Yamaha logo (black) to use as give aways at the 2 stroke meet held annually at Deals Gap in May. I really admire you folks who can just come up with a design and implement it. I couldn't draw my way out of a wet paper bag. :-[

Yeah...as a gas additive, it doesn't work. Jeff

I'm going to be giving FDC a try. There is a distributor in NJ who has an actual website that I can order from...either that, or I can ask a friend of mine to pick my order up on her way home from work...no shipping :woohoo:

The parts only fit together one way. The rectangular pieces are the "feet" and the 3 rounded beams are the "legs" and the cross piece. The 2 rounded beams that are the same length are the legs. The flat brackets mount on the inside of the legs with the angles facing out and then screw to the top of the legs and the bottom of the Pcut.