darcshadow

I bought the starter pack like 5 years ago and I still have most of those colors left. I mostly use that vinyl for blasting and powder coating mask and use the Oracal that I bought later for any real jobs. Later when I got into HTV I learned my lesson, I have a stock of a few colors I use often then just buy the others as needed. I do always buy extra so I have enough to do a few extra designs if I mess up, or the customer decides they want more.

Check your cutting stripe and make sure it's not damaged.

The thickness of a buisnes card .020" is about 10 times too much blade. Oracal 651, for example, is only 0.0025" thick. So you only need that much blade sticking out to cut through it. Any more than that and you are cutting into your backing material. Mz Skeeter has posted hundreds, if not thousands of times the correct way to set your blade depth. Follow her guide and you'll be cutting great right away.

Which two circles are you having problems with? I opened it with Inkscape and everything looks good as well. I did notice some of the shapes have a stroke to them but that shouldn't cause them not to cut. Also, I don't know if it's just the way Inkscape reads a PDF but there are a lot of layers to the design. For cut vinyl the less layers the better. If your program is using the multiple layers I would suggest punching parts of the design through the other colors to reduce the layer count. This design is 3 colors and can rather easily be done in 2 layers. I would make gold the base layer and just cut one big circle. I would the punch the text through the blue and layer the blue on the gold, and do the same with the white.

That is a relatively simple design and it would be a good one to practice redrawing by hand rather than an auto trace. Text especially rarely traces well and you can always get a much better result by finding the font and recreating.

Is signcut a purely cutting program or can you create simple shapes/text with it? If you can, give that a try. Make something simple in signcut and see what you get. If not I'd suggest Inkscape to design in. It's extremely powerful and best of all free.

well if that's the case you don't need 5600, you want 5500 or 5300.

I misspoke/typed and looked up 5500. As Dakota said looks like it's currently sold out.

How well does printing on black vinyl work? Seems like that would require some specialized inks to get it to show up well, or at all.

They do, $190, for a 24"x10 yard roll. Not a bad price really. The price for reflective from anyone is going to be high, just the way it is. It's a specialized vinyl, not as easy to make, and not as much demand for it as normal vinyl. It does look good though.

I believe, and I could be wrong, the redsail and the MH cutters have basically the same guts. If that is the case, the force, speed, and origin have to be set on the cutter, they are not software controllable.

Yeah, cutters are not like other electronics where a new/upgrade model comes out every year. There have been guys on the forums using the same cutter for decades.

And if you have to, you can always design on the Mac and cut on a windows computer. Most all of the low end cutters have a serial port and if you use that you don't need any cutter specific driver, you just need a program that works on a Mac and can connect to the printer via a serial port. The tripplite Keyspan adapter is a great usb-2-serial adapter if you computer does not have a serial port, which most do not these days.

Mz Skeeter is asking because while what you are doing may be working for you, it is not the intended use of the cutter and will ruin the cutting strip making future cuts not as clean. Have you tried a different program for printing? From this statement, it sounds to me like it is a software problem and you may not be able to use Graphtec Studio to print with your printer. What printer are you using?

EPS was created by Adobe and is proprietary but publicly documented format. Meaning any one can make use of it and virtually every vector program does.

I don't know anything about Graphtec Studio but according to their web page it can import EPS. No mention of what version it is that does that, but I would think even the lowest version should be able to open/import an eps file.

Have you tried manually creating the folder it is looking for? Might get lucky and that's all you need to do.

Also keep in mind, the people that hang their vinyl with no issues rarely post anything on Amazon, it's only the people that have problems that make the noise. I put some 631 on a textured wall with no problems multiple times.

VM does that stupid thing with auto backup files as well. I made a batch script that runs each time I start my computer to find and remove them all.

I'm a big Inkscape fan. I just do this as a hobby but it has been able to do everything I've needed. You can even cut directly from it, although it's cutting is very basic. I personally would stick with your current cutting software for cutting and use Inkscape for design. Design software is really more about personal preference than anything else.

The cut is coming out exactly as it is shown on your screen. If the top of the A is the toward the top of the arrow then the top of the A will be at the edge of the vinyl as the cut starts. Or another way to think of it, the cutter will be at the bottom of the arrow when the cut is done and if you look at it from the front of the machine you are looking at it upside down.

Are you saving as an SVG file? VinylMaster has issues with opening them, they don't always come through correct. If you save the file as an eps then open it in VM it should come out correct.

If you loose sbd though you'd still have to recreate the layout, not as much work as recreating an image, but still work. Easier to just save it as eps in the first place then open it in the future with what ever program you like.

Keep in mind though, even if you do advance after the plot you still can not send another job right away. It'll advance to the origin and start cutting over the first design. You have to be sure to hit the reset origin button after each job.

If you must stay on a Mac, you could give Inkscape a try. It's a great free design program and has some rudimentary cutting capabilities.