Wildgoose

We need a little more information to be of much help. #1 What program did you use to open it? I assume you are talking about a cutting program that wouldn't open the drawing, signcut, sure-cuts-a little-pro, signblazer...which one are we talking about. #2 Did you draw the design in illustrator? if so upload it here and we will take a look. Depending on whats going on there could be several reasons for having a problem. If you drew in illustrator then it should be a vector already but if you simply imported (placed) a picture in illustrator then you still have a raster image. Assuming you actually drew a vector then perhaps you saved it at the wrong setting for your program to open it. SCALP will open CS5 versions but just about every other cutting program out there needs to be saved as Illustrator 8 which is much older before the CS versions came into being. Hang in there. Once you figure out the basics it will start to be easier.

Looks great! Once your hooked it grows on you.

http://www.signcutpro.com/ If you didn't get SCALP then I can't in good conscience recommend that you buy it but SignCut Pro works great in opinion. Try the free trial, looks like it might just be 7 days but I think you will like it. Has great cutting tools like tiling, registration marks and you can cut in step-by-step user defined lengths if you have a lang design that the tracking is giving you trouble. Just save to Illustrator 8 and then open that file in SignCut Pro and you're ready to go. (you will have to load the correct drivers when you install but it will give you a list to choose from and it has most of not all the USCutter machines as well as high end cutters.

I would recommend a pillow or two and press pads. I have one pillow for regular size shirts and one that is about 5"x18" for sleeves. These work great if you are fighting seams or collars, also keeps most of the heat off something on the opposite side. I only have one press pad 5"x6" but it is very well used especially for crest prints near pockets or buttons. Oh, I almost forgot, I have a roll of the green heat tape that I use once in a while when something has to be held perfectly in place and I use it almost all the time on the hat press. A little goes a long way and you can re-use it 10-20 times at least if you're doing multiple items.

Here is my version. I have the extra little wings and shield separate in the cut. This file is AI version 8 Callofduty8ai.ai

I just bumped across this older post. Mark is amazing! I would second the vote for King.

If yours is similar to my swing away 15" shirt press then you will want to get an infrared thermometer or as someone suggested stick a cooking thermometer in while its down. I found my USCutter swing away is some where in between F and C. Weird. Once I found that out all of my pressing problems went away and its a great press. I do NOT have the swing away hat press however so don't take what I say as gospel. I use mostly Siser but some stahls and have memorized what temp Siser likes. The rest I just check it before I press. Incidentally I watched a video on the swing away hat press and noticed that it had a tendency to hit the hat, even in the video. I ended up finding a used Stahls hat press on ebay for $100 so I grabbed it. It's old but works great except theres no timer which sucks. It has a spring loaded arm that stretches the hat once you put in in place and holds some pressure. I can tell I would really miss that if I didn't have it.

Funny thing about my Summa, It actually came with a special cutter basically the same as the letter openers above and you can change out the blade, it uses just good old fashioned razors like your dad used to use before the disposables. There is a specific grove built into the machine to slide it in. I laughed when I first saw it because I had been doing the same basic thing with the P-Cut and letter openers. I though I was some smart genius who had come up with the idea but I guess it has occurred to many many people before me. LOL

Ya I do the same thing, and compare the cut with different vinyls to see if they cut better. My wife thinks I'm nuts

Double check that your cinch rollers are located above the traction rubber/grit roller on the drive shaft. I and several others did that without really paying attention when we were new at this. Pull the vinyl back out look at the cinch rollers and move things around to be able to be over those spots or you'll have a bad run for sure.

Those are both great. Isn't it silly how much time we spend dorking around with stuff like that!

Bikemike has a great point. If you're a newbie you may want to consider an entry level machine. Much less initial expense and while slower, noisier and less accurate the entry models do a lot better than you would think on a bang for buck comparison. I used a P-Cut for over two years and easily made enough off it to afford the new Summa. Now that I have the Summa I am totally spoiled but the lessons I learned with the other machine served me well in understanding the whole shooting match. I also appreciate the higher tech machine more than someone who has never used a budget cutter. The local shop here in town supports more Graphtec than Roland but I think it would depend on things like that if I were choosing between those two. I researched and ended up spending more to get the Summa but that was a personal choice as I decided I didn't want to get down the road 4 years and want to upgrade yet again.

Am I to understand that you have an Illustrator CC (creative cloud) subscription? I'm jealous. That would be the newest hot ticket but if you haven't learned how to use it I can see where you could get very frustrated. Tough program to learn but well worth your time to figure it out. There are quite a few free online vids to help with the basics. If I get some free time I may bust that one out for you but I would rather be giving you tips on how to do it yourself.

If you didn't get SCALP with the cutter then you can try a subscription to SignCut Pro which they will let you have a two week free trial (great program BTW, I actually use it on my $3K Summa cutter) You will need to down-save your artwork to illustrator 8 which seems to be a requirement for several of the cutting programs (not SCALP though, they were running right from CS5 last time I used mine). If you decide to go with SignCut Pro you will need a live internet feed. They also sell a dongle for about $300 that doesn't require an internet connection.

I was up late last night working over a US Flag for a 1/4 scale train a friend of mine has. He wanted something similar to the waving flag that Union Pacific put on their trains after 9/11. Thought I would share it, I have grabbed so many great ideas from this thread. US Flag.eps

Awesome! I use CS5, Like the new layout in CS6 but I haven't been able to justify the cost to upgrade. I noticed the CC version that's out has some sweet text options but I don't want to pay a monthly subscription. I have a whole mess of kids and we eat lots of them taters ourselves.

If you are doing 6" numbers you will use about 40" of vinyl for a 17 number run. Call it 48" and at rough current siser prices that would be about $11-12 for the vinyl its self. Cut and weed is easy on those but I'd still add maybe another $12 for that and then you will have to figure out how big the names would be and rough guess the vinyl consumption and time spent. Then there is the press time. By the time you pre heat and get the jersey straight and press two sides you better figure on 5 minutes a jersey which might be light. I don't know your rates but I would probably be in the $6-$7 per shirt range for two sided if they are supplying the garment but I sometimes work too cheap.

Smack away Mommy, we can take it. Welcome from the other side of the states, Idaho. What design program do you work with mostly?

What program do you use? You have posted that thing at least three times and even in SCALP that would be a simple build. No offense meant but at some point you have to learn to do your own work if you're going to stay in this line of business or even if it's a hobby. There are a lot of people on the forum who will help out, myself included, but we all have projects of our own and most of us are trying to make a living. The rails themselves are just a series of rectangles with a couple lines across them welded together and the word rail looks like helvetica or some other basic block text that has been slanted or is in italics. This is about as simple as your going to get.

You did a great job on that especially if it was your first. I like to do my shadows the way you did the with the outline of the main letter still showing through. It helps keep it easy to read from a distance. The first time I did my own vehicle I just did a black layer under the other with some offset but if you got more than 15 feet away it started to get distracting to read.

If you have any kind of curves I would recommend going on up to 751. It's 1/2 mil thinner too. I did a set of wii remotes with green zebra pattern and they have held up fantastic. Been on there for a couple years. The rubber slip on has been more off than on. I expected them to come right off but they haven't

I have always heard soap is bad because it leaves some behind. Maybe I've been mislead and anyone can chime in if that is so. I use citrus based solvent to remove adhesives (I call it agent orange) then I use a mixture of water with denatured alcohol for basic clean-up and to remove the agent orange if I used it. The alcohol is cheap and I just mix 10-20% by volume. (Also have used several of the wet app sprays to clean. They do great.) As a final touch I usually wipe down with rubbing alcohol to be sure all the grease and fingerprints are gone. It would probably remove soap film too if you used soap. That's my $0.02

I guess I didn't have that font. I do now! Here is another couple versions if you want them. The one in pink has the zebra pattern running under the colored top layer a little. MissPriss1.eps MissPriss2.eps

Dan I don't know how to use coreldraw but I commend you on your question. Many newbies come on here and just ask someone to do it for them instead of how to actually do it for themselves. There are several ways to accomplish what you are wanting and I'll give you some hints but they are from Illustrator which is totally different in terms and how you go about things. One way would be to add a white outline to the top object which will cause a separation like you are looking for. In Illustrator you would have to then outline the stroke so it is not just a colored line. That may be what you are having a problem with so far. Once the stroke is outlined you should be able to crop, merge or some such action into the shadow to cut it out of the way. (oh you will probably have to do some action to get the drop shadow as an object too) I often just copy the original word and paste it under the original to create the drop shadow effect. Another way to do the separation would be to build your drop shadow by copy paste method and place it under then select the top word and offset the paths which should create a new object bigger than the first. (You can decide how far to offset which will enlarge the gap) Once you have the offset object select both it and the lower one which is the shadow and use minus front or whatever corel does that is the same thing and it should cut away the areas you don't want leaving just the drop shadow. I don't know if that makes any sense at all, especially trying to look at it from a corel standpoint. I tried a coreldraw free trial once and couldn't get anything done it is enough different from Illustrator. The overall actions are the same in the end but the program go at it from different directions sometimes.

What font is that? I think I have it but I'll be darned if I can find it.