Wildgoose

Welcome from Idaho.

That is your application? Is this like a stencil or something? If you are trying to transfer vinyl over it will need to be strong enough to get the vinyl off the carrier. Finding a single sheet os going to be a challenge more than finding a low tack app tape that only comes in really long rolls.

Most HTV that will block migration are thick and stiff. Some are in the middle and handle migration pretty good without sacrificing "hand" which is what we call the feel of the product on the shirt. Siser Easyweed is about as good a middle road that does a pretty good job at not migrating too badly. Most problems come when trying to use white or a very light color on sublimated blue, red, orange etc.... You can also work around it sometimes. Like if you have a white number with a dark outline second color you might stack the two colors so that background creates a color block from the white top color. Most times when I build two colors I put the center color in and actually have the background be an outline only that goes over the top. When doing this it's best to leave some bleed (overlap) where the outline can cover the edges of the inner color because everything shrinks and does weird things when it gets hot. It produces a better hand not being truly layered but if fighting dye migration then the stacked method might be a way to combat this.

Nothing wrong with starting out with something affordable. I did. I personally think learning on a budget cutter makes you a better operator. The budget cutters have to be "tuned" a little to cut clean and there are limits to what they will do on large graphics as well as tiny ones. Learning this limit you will be much more appreciative when/if you ever upgrade to a servo machine. Doing this fine tuning repeatedly will train you so you learn to recognize what's happening if something doesn't come out right. You sound like what you are starting out with will be one at a time items and that's the best for the budget models. When you start getting into multiple copies of things the memory and tracking are less so they have trouble. My budget model would only safely do about 10 copies of small left chest tee shirt logos or it would wig out and mess things up. I had to sort of hover over it the whole time ready to push the abort button if something went wonky. When my workload started becoming increasingly parser orders I upgraded and now I just load it up and set it to cutting and walk off while it works. I had a couple orders that were several hours of cutting that worked well into the night while I went to bed.

Ok so they are currently out of stock at my normal supply shop and he is moving his business so it could be a little bit before they come available again. It's a convoluted situation with his supplier who has been an older retired gentleman who hand ground these and he hasn't been able to contact, as in possibly retired permanent but I will post some info as soon as I can get it figured out. In the meantime I am working another angle which should prove fruitful.

Plexiglass of more durable and from what my local supplier told me is usually used if the sign is low enough for someone to easily hit it with something because it will take a hit better. The Acrylic will resist the sun better (yellowing) but is more brittle.

I will PM you about them.

I am a tweezer kind of guy. I have a large pair I bought from USC that works great on adhesive vinyl but for HTV which I do 95% of the time now I have these customer ground machinist tweezers. They are custom cut from some sort of hardened spring steel. They a little aggressive for regular adhesive vinyl but for heat transfer they do a really great job of grabbing hold and pulling it up off the sticky carrier. You grab them with your fingers up on the wide part of the triangular tip and it gives you a LOT of pinching force. Made specifically to dig out metal slivers the machinist guys get in the shop. My girls think they're the best thing since ice-cream for plucking eyebrows and such so they wander off a lot. I have bought several pairs. Not cheap at $25 each but like any good tool are worth every penny. When I can't find them I get really grumpy.

That substrate is usually either something like lexan or acrylic. Not likely to hold up to trying to save it. Better to replace it. The few (3) I have tried to mess with had become brittle with age in the sun and cracked. I wasted a lot of time on the first two which were a double sided sign only to have it break on me. It was for a family member who owns a business. The vinyl you want is translucent and allows light to come through. Regular vinyl will look dark or even black at night when it's bulbs are on.

gman - Just another thing to check. The MH is problematic as mentioned. SignCut has live tech support and they are REALLY good. You have to put in for a support ticket on the website and they will usually get back to you pretty quickly. They will get the program side sorted if you have anything within it set wrong. That will eliminate the software side. I am one of a very few who use the SignCut software here on the forum. I do it because I run mac computers AND windows and it's one of the few that will run on both. I would try and make sure your choice of measurement increments within SignCut match the metric .25mm that are on the blade box. Can't remember if changing the measure also changes all the same with the offset. Be sure the offset is 0.25 and not accidentally 25 is what I'm saying and if you happened to mess with the increments such as switching to inches (not likely since you are UK based) because 0.25 inches is a whale of a difference than 0.25mm. This may have nothing to do with whats happening but it's possibly something to double check. The other possibility is making VERY sure the driver is the correct one. SignCut has tons of machine choice options in the cutter set-up menu. Incorrect choices here could also cause major problems. Someone mentioned starting out with a circle or a square and see if it will cut it ok then add another object and see what happens. You're probably getting frustrated and upset about now, I know I would be.

I would at the very least get in touch with a dealer and get the real info. They may tell you that it's fine for regular too. I can't imagine needing 450g of force for any paper cutting so it is at least based on the regular platform. The up and down force thing is how Summa does their perf cutting for contour cutting printed stickers so that may just be a setting. I am making the assumption that you found a good price on a used one somewhere is why you are looking at it. If buying new then don't waste your time.

So a long while back I made a trip to Denver to grab a heavy duty walking foot sewing machine I bought at an auction. Jburns had helped me out by actually picking it up and taking it to his house for me. (you're a stud Jason btw) So while there he talked me into taking a Gerber Edge printer and Gerber enVision plotter off his hands at a very attractive price that I just couldn't pass up. I have had them sitting in the garage for a long time trying to get around to working with them. Finally got some time and pulled them in and got them running. I am an apple computer guy so I ended up having to go fine a decent used windows machine that had the right connectors to run the older edge printer. This took about a week because the first try had an aftermarket plug in that was problematic. Once I got a box with a native 25 pin and serial port the two machines hooked up without incident. I currently have an active Flexi 19 license on rent so I have the RIP to print and the production manager to also do the contour cuts. It's been at times a little frustrating and still occasionally has issues but overall I have a new toy! I'm going to give it whirl and make some hard hat decals and see how it goes. It's a bit cumbersome in my dinning room added to all the other stuff I have there but it's pretty cool to be able to print stickers. I have talked myself out of a Summa DC5x several times due to space and cost etc... this was a good opportunity to test the market with much less expense and commitment. My wife will soon be asking me to "stage" it back in the garage and bring it in when I actually am dong a print job but it's fun to have around.

That's pretty wild. AP = Apparel Pattern. Looks pretty specialized and I would wonder if it can be used for vinyl or not. Definitely not what it was designed for although the rest of the spec seem similar to the regular CE cutter.

Kevin if you sign up for the forum you don't have to wait until we approve of your guest posting. Here is some pertinent information from a post last season that should help you. There are a couple different scenarios discussed about similar things to your design.

Not sure how they market them up there in Canada but the Summa S2 T series cutters are true tangential heads that steer the blade along the vector and are supposed to be remarkable compared to drag knife cutters especially when cutting things like you are talking about or small stuff. I have wanted one really bad just cause I'm a cutter snob I guess. Have not had the wherewithal to get chewed out by my better half for dropping that much cash on something I don't absolutely need. (the nerve of her questioning me like that, hurump) They only sell them in a very few dealers here in the states but I think it's more normal out of country. Worth looking at and I'd be jealous if you get one. On the 750 grams force on the Titan I have always wanted someone to test this against an FC at 600. I kind of winder if it's accurate or not. FC's are renowned for dealing with thick stuff. I watched the Titan in a video running at supposedly 350mm/sec of such speed but my summa (drag knife version) runs about that fast at just 200mm/sec so it makes me wonder. Not dogging them because for the price they are still a good buy for what you get. I guess if you get an FC you can do the test in house, if you do definitely post some results. Inquiring minds what to know.

I always apply dry on flat surfaces. You are seeing the downside to cheaper cutters. There IS the possibility of stretching accidentally when applying but if you are using good paper app tape it's not all that likely. That is well over the size that you will have good results with. The budget cutters really struggle with large graphics over about 24 inches long and also with really small stuff. There is a reason people pay so much more for high end machines. My Summa runs over $3500 but I started on a $400 Chinese cutter. It still got the job done but Oh what a difference when I decided to upgrade. The results you are having were regular occurrences when I was using my P-Cut. I got pretty good at chasing where to try and overlap things so that there were places I could hand trim and not see the misses as bad.

So I went and looked through SIgnCut a bit to help me remember where things are located. Your Blade offset is in the CUTTER tab as are the Baud rate which is also very important to have right. You'll have to read through your paperwork to be sure of the correct baud rate. The OVERCUT and some other options are found over in the cut menu when you press the little scissors button. Using the software force and speed settings is set in this area as well. In Advanced settings there is an option for tangential emulation mode and I would avoid using this at least to start with.

300 Seems a little high but as Skeeter said each cutter is a little different. Your cuts look bad bad and I kind of think that you accidentally broke a tip earlier and that has added to the confusion. Happens pretty easy if you are inexperienced and most of us have done the very same more than once so don't feel bad. I am a long time SIgnCut Pro1 user. Great program IMO, so good that I stayed with them after upgrading to a high end cutter. I am looking at your cut pic after the test and trying to even figure out how the long cuts that extend from the corners can happen. I am pretty sure those are from way way too much blade offset. If it were just at the start of an object it would be more like too much over-cut. I don't know if you have another blade but if you do and have not already done so I would put one in and go through the blade depth setting again like before. When you use "some force" it should not be enough to cut all the way through the backing if the blade was long enough but enough that there is no question that you are getting the most of the cut that is possible with the blade set slightly less than the full thickness of the vinyl and backing combined. After making sure you have that set about right then I would take a guess at pressure more around the 90 to 110 gr mark to start with and maybe even try at 70 or so just to be darn sure you don't overdo it and push through too far. Once you get used to your machine you will find that you usually run in one or two pressure ranges based on the type of vinyl. This is more evident on the budget cutters than on higher end machines for whatever reason. BEFORE do the test cut for pressure make sure your blade OFF-SET is set around .25mm and your blade OVER-CUT at zero. The MH cutters have to be set within the SIgnCut program I'm pretty sure. Other models may have these tools on the cutter home screen and there is somewhere within SignCut where you choose to let SignCut control these settings or control them on the plotter. Lastly, if the design is not copyright protected maybe you can upload the vector design and we can take a peek and make sure there isn't something weird goin on with it. The test cut had rounded corners but didn't look that bad compared to the next picture.

60 degree blades for thick material. Cut it at slow speeds too.

That kind of sucks when you thought you upgraded to the proper version. You can do it manually but it's a work around. Make two files or however many it takes to do the size you're building. You can cut the design into parts but there needs to be some overlap so you have to allow for that. You must be doing some SERIOUS blasting to be that big.

Oh yeah it does it good. I do these from time to time. You can blast etch through about anything. I typically see the anodized aluminum but have etched all sorts of stuff with good results. The hardest thing so far was a porcelain tile which was hard enough I had to use real blast resist. Bottles and such vinyl works fine.

There are several elements to being successful in this craft. Each one is as important as the next.

I probably use a little more tack but agree with slice. Your name will become associated to a degree with the end product. I definitely STEER my clients one way or the other usually to make my part of the job go easier. Usually an up-charge for "difficult" design elements will do it. Like Ok here is the price for the design as received or here is a better price if we do this a little differently etc... there are ways to get them to loosen up or at least make a little extra money to put up with the trouble. This is especially easy to do if you are also doing the design work. I just don't offer them things that are too hard to build, like graphics that HAVE to be printed like a self portrait or a gradient shadow or severely distressed elements. Your logo is pieced together with elements that are available online. I have those very mountains from a vector I purchased through shutter stock or one of the others. The rest is just typed and modified lettering. Auto traces always look horrible and I think some of what we are seeing are results from that. I am a little OCD when it comes to design work but every sign guy in the world can spot a bad job.

Old post but most likely sand blast.

No once you convert in most programs it's a done deal. I TRY to remember to always save a "working" file off that still has the live text but sometimes forget. If you remember the font just type a hyphen in anywhere on the design, convert it to outlines and drag it up there and like they said drag the 9 over enough that it looks right. I often resize or change hyphens when the font's I am working in don't appeal to me.