Wildgoose

You guys crack me up!

Once I started spraying anti-static cling around the area before cutting I didn't have near as many problems. The P-Cut didn't like doing large numbers of copies. I kept it to maybe 10 of any one item. I attributed that to small memory but not sure. I had great success with Signcut so it probably boils down to what you get used to. In fact when I bought the Summa I didn't like the basic cutting tools it comes with and looked into upgrading to a full version and it is a lot of coin so I contacted SignCut and they wrote some drivers for me to run the Summa and I'm back using it with the Summa. On the P-Cut having the step-by-step cutting that is available in signcut is a real nice tool for long graphics it makes the tracking issues bearable.

I have a model 1200. I think you are experiencing the dreaded static electricity problem that plagues the P-Cuts. I ended up getting some of the anti-static spray that you would use for fabric and give things a good spray and it basically eliminated this problem for me. I don't remember the wording that showed up on my screen on the cutter but it sound like the same thing you are getting. It'e not your software and I don't think a serial cable will fix it either. I cut off a USB just fine. It will sit there forever and never finish. Very aggravating and ruined vinyl. Seems like I had to let mine sit for a while, like an hour to get it to start back up and work properly again too so if you are trying to just restart it may need to de-energize. Good luck. My final permanent cure was a new Summa cutter but I still have the P-Cut for back-up.

15" x 15" for sure. I bought the swing away from US Cutter and was really surprised at how quickly it paid for itself. WAY more of that kind of work waiting for you than you think. I don't even have to go looking for the work once people in my area figured out I did it I get phone calls all the time then they tell people about me and it spreads. There is a lot more of a nitch for customized apparel than I had any clue was out there. Good profit margin too and I am several dollars a shirt under the local shop who gouges everyone and just drives people to me. LOL its awesome!

That's tough sometimes to know what to do. I did some shirts for a gal a while back and she drew what she was wanting on them on a piece of paper. I scanned it in and traced it out and gave her a proof that looked almost exactly like her drawing with a little cleaning up and she started laughing. She said "That's exactly like what I drew" I'm like "Yep". She says "Maybe I better spend a little more time on it" and she re-drew a nice clean looking design that definitely looked better and we went with that one. The point is there was no way I could have ever gotten from point A to point B since she had something specific in her mind. Not a good mind reader I guess. Thank goodness her shirts were transfers rather than vinyl because it was all scrolling letters and weird intersecting lines with little frilly ends and stuff.

Here is a pic of one of the wii remotes. This is Oracal 751 and they have lasted WAY longer than I would have thought. I am sure you could figure out something for a phone.

I should have renamed that second one that I hand traced to avoid getting them confused. Sorry I didn't pay more attention.

Here is a true tracing to give you something to compare results with. I didn't do any modification to make it look like another year like you were wanting and I just followed my interpretation of the pic as it was but hopefully you can use this. It should cut ok if you go big enough. 65 wagon.eps

Only thing I have done was a set of tiger stripes for my kids wii remotes. They turned out fine, did one in green and one in red. I just placed the remote on a flat bed scanner and used the image for a template and it worked great. Curved surfaces on a phone might make things a bit more interesting.

I downloaded your pic and did a quick trace in Inkscape (on my day job work computer) and this is what I cam up with. It may get you started or not but here you go. Assuming I attached this correctly that is. Have a good day! 65 Wagon.eps

There are tons of youtube vids on using Inkscape to help you learn and the program also has a decent bunch of exercises in the help menu that will get you going in the right direction. It gets easier as you learn and you will be rewarded for your efforts big time once you can do this stuff yourself. There are other great programs like Illustrator or Corel Draw that are a little more high zoot that Inkscape but cost some money to get into and essentially do the same thing. Hard to beat Inkscape bang for buck and regardless of how you go its worth downloading and using if nothing more than to help decide what you may want to upgrade to in the future.

You don't need to apologize, the other good part about this forum is that everyone is fairly level headed and won't roast you for every little thing you say either. You might try downloading a free copy of Inkscape to try getting a better vector conversion. I have never used signblazer so I don't know how it is set up to compare with Inkscape. Most of these programs will take a shot at vectoring a picture and then you can go in and clean up the image to suit what you want it to look like by moving around the "nodes" and actual points within the design. If you want it to be nice and super clean then you will probably have to trace it out from scratch. That is what I would do, but it will be time consuming either way. There isn't an easy button for getting a vector image that is clean. There are some who will do it for $$ and once in a while on a whim for free, I would expect to pay a minimum of $25. Most of us just do our own to save the money and get that warm fuzzy of having created a masterpiece....at least in our own minds.

phlint, Around here folks are super helpful but you are expected to do your own work. The Teach a Man to Fish and feed him his whole life concept is applied liberally. If you want some tips on HOW to do what you are talking about rather than hoping someone is feeling like donating several hours to your cause you will receive more assistance. We all have our own little projects going too. No offense. Not saying someone won't do it for you either.

You usually want it to overlap a little so it won't creep apart over time. I usually go at least 1/4".

You will probably also want to get at least a full sized pressing pillow to help when seams get in the way. Or if you have a graphic on the back that you want to shield while pressing the front. I have a large approx 12" x 14" pillow and a longer skinny one that is about 5" x 16" for sleeves and another 5" x 6"piece of rubber (I think I had to buy at stahls) called a "perfect press pad" that I use for shirt front pockets when there are buttons or seams nearby. Other than that you are ready to go except for some practice.

It looks like you are using Oracal 651. I often use a medium tack tape for stuff that I am afraid will have problems getting off the tape. I have some of the Clear Choice AT60 clear tape that works well and I also use this for the craft moms who I do stuff for. They like it because they can see the colors and line things up and it comes off nice. Also have some R-Tape medium I forget the number but it works about the same with less of the stretching you can get with clear. The only thing you have to watch with the medium tack is sometimes they don't lift off the liner as good.

I draw on a mac so that pretty much settles the question for me right there. I would be surprised if there is anything that one can do that the other can't. Different steps to get there maybe and sometimes that makes one easier than the other. There are things I don't like about illustrator. If you are working on a REALLY small graphic there is abuilt in logorithim that tries to align things to the pixel grid on the screen and makes it impossible to get the nodes to go where they should. No way around it and it pises me off. I end up resizing to a bigger size to get things to line up. The nodes can occasionally be hard to grab and you have to zoom in a bit and try again. stuff like that. Really hard to learn at first unless you are someone who has already learned photoshop. I bought the program and expected to be able to just start working with it but couldn't. I think it may boil down to getting used to what you want to run and stick with it to save your sanity.

Hey don't get me wrong, I have never used corel or flexi and they are probably both fine products. IMHO anyone doing simple vinyl work (as appossed to digital print) is building real simple graphic art anyway so just about any vector program is going to get you there and with practice and familarity I don't think it matters which program you want to use. Illustrators biggest problem for most newbies is that is is huge which overwhelms your brain and the program doesn't assume anything so you have to dial in most of the functions to fit what you are doing. Kind of like having a fancy camera that needs to be ran in the manual setting. Amatures can't get a good picture because it has very few auto settings but pros can do things with near perfect results. I didn't go to college to learn to use it but I took a college level online course that took over three months of evenings to get through. Lot of commitment but now its easy. My business actually started out as a vector file conversion thing and then morphed into vinyl work once I realized I could cut the stuff I had been doing if I bought a cutter.

Ha Ha! Thats what happens when a newbie orders a 48" x 10yd roll of white greenstar vinyl with his new cutter. We bought an older home with outdated kithcen cabinets and I haven't had the time of $$$ to replace them. Was looking at the cruddy condition and decided to try to use up some of that roll I bought way back. It's obviously super thick and had stayed down real well and thats saying something because some of the shelves are bare chipboard with a little laquer on them. They were horrible but are nice and white now! Beats the heck out of contact paper.

I work too cheap mostly but would have been at $6/ea on those so you are right in there. They still saved plenty over a lot of places. Doing vinyl is nice because you don't the high set-up costs screenprinters do. I get a lot of business because of it. (plus the local shirt shop has pretty much offended every living person in town)

Hate to tell you but thats a 1997 or newer wrangler. Hood is a little different, and fender wels are bigger. I doubt it would make a huge dif for most stuff but wraps would be off I think. YJ wrnaglers switched to TJ wranglers in '97 and got round headlights and slightly tapered hood with cool latches, coil springs etc. I had a 93 YJ and always wanted a TJ.

I have both. My P-Cut came with the SignCut Pro but I got tired of paying a subscription so I jumped on the SCALP for $50 deal they had early on. I I am ok with SCALP as a cutting utility but it is lacking some key aspects that the tech support guys said they would get integrated sometime this summer. (not as of yet). I have since bought a new cutter and was not happy with the factory cutting tools and have ended up back with SignCut Pro. I may just go ahead and buy the dongle so I can stop making subscription payments. SCALP won't work with my new cutter and I kind of have it planned to keep with my old cutter as a back-up system or I may sell it off. My opinion is if you are just cutting smaller stuff SCALP is a decent cutting tool but not a very great design tool. SignCut is a good cutting tool and almost no design ability. Advantage of SignCut for cheap cutters is it has step-by-step cutting that will help get through long cuts on machines that don't track very good. It also does tiling and cut by color real easily. SCALP works and does have cut by color but often files import wrong and don't have the color layers you built them with. SCALP will accept native AI files in current versions rather than downsaving them to illustrator 8 which SignCut requires. If SCALP will eventually get the tiling and step-by-step cutting they would be pretty close to par.

I agree. SCALP works fine for cutting but the design side is a little tough to work with. When it first came out I played with it a little to see how it felt and thought it was fairly easy, then I actually tried to build a file in in one day on a lark and found out it was not. I am a dedicated Illustrator guy and have always felt that Inkscape was clunky and counter-intuitive but Inkscape is definitely heads above SCALP for design. (AND FREE) If you have the coin and time to learn the program, Illustrator is the boss. It is real complicated until you learn it then it is absurdly simple and you look back wondering what seemed so hard. Like driving with a clutch.

Yup. What he said. I use the Greenstar as a cheap option for folks who are really wanting to keep the cost down. Its not horrible stuff but the longevity is suspect and it shrinks a lot. Oracal 651 is great affordable vinyl for most applications, even small decals on vehicles and glass. I usually step it up to 751 for any real vehicle applications like door logos etc. The 751 is cast and won't shrink. Lifespan is longer too and I have better luck getting small stuff to stay stuck. The 651 can sometimes be easier to cut real small graphics on because it is a little stiffer and doesn't tend to pull up during the cutting process but then is harder to weed for the same reason. I do 75%-651 20%-751 and 5%-GStar. GStar is pretty tough though. I used some white to cover the inside of our kitchen cabinet shelves that were looking shabby. It has lasted so good I can hardly believe it and gets abused everyday with plates and all the usual getting tossed and slid on it. Been in there over a year.

Unless you have an order I wouldn't go all crazy ordering a bunch of stock. The likelihood of having the right color for the job will be low. I made that mistake when I started up too and still have several 10yd rolls of vinyl I just assumed I would be using for something. For shirts you are absolutely safe getting Black and White. If you have a school nearby that you anticipate making misc for t-shirts I stock the school colors and consequently have grabbed a LOT of work for parents and kids that want a quick shirt or a name on their sweatshirt etc. Over time as I have done misc work I have accumulated a lot more t-shirt vinyl colors and usually charge any large job with a full roll and then can make great coin on the one-at-a-time shirts when they come along by using the leftovers. I prefer Siser Easyweed products. They have a lower app temperature and I like having the carrier with some stickiness that helps keep it in place when pressing and if you accidentally pull up something you shouldn't you have a chance of getting it to stick back down.