darcshadow

Didn't realize that was still on. Watched season 1 and it just didn't pull me in. Just felt like an X-Files knock off to me.

Wonder what percentage of people driving by know what the TARDIS is, or for that matter, what a blue police call box is.

ha! that's awesome.

I'm rather surprised no one has ever created a converter tool. People create converters all the time for proprietary files, I've never looked at a .studio file, but I wouldn't think it would be all that complicated to reverse engineer. Guess maybe there isn't a large enough demand for it.

Do you have any other editing software outside of signblazer? Open it in something else then just copy and paste into SB. And as Mz Skeeter asked, were you trying to open it, or import it? SB will not open eps files but it will import them, assuming they are the older format of eps.

Second go at a tumbler. Used vinyl as mask to lay down the black, baked it, then put the yellow over. I'm really pleased with how well the black shows through the yellow, much better than the pink did. Using 631 as the mask, but it's a bit tricky. Let it bake too long, try to take it off while the cup is too hot, or after it cools down and the adhesive doesn't want to come off. Have to find that sweet spot of warm but not too hot and the vinyl peals off easy but have to be quick cause the cup cools pretty quickly. I also think my toaster oven may be too small to do these. I think I "burnt" the yellow a little. You can't really see in the photo, but there is some discoloration of the yellow that I believe is because it was too close to the heating elements. And I know the image is copyrighted and all but this is just for my pleasure and Dodge has enough of my money, they can give me this little thing. ha!

You'll want a booth of some kind as well to put the part in while you're shooting the powder. I just use a large cardboard box with a small fan in the back to pull air through the box and keep the powder from drifting back toward me. Not the best setup, but it didn't cost me anything and works well enough for now. My goal is to build something eventually and put laminate on it so that it is smooth and easy to clean. There is a good amount of powder "wasted" that if you have a clean surface and clean brush you could reclaim about 80% of the wasted powder and reuse it. I also just picked up an IR thermometer to better know what the temp. of the item in the oven and adjust the oven as necesary. The toaster oven doesn't do well at regulating it's temperature when I stand it on it's side to fit the taller items in.

The Eastwood kit is what I have. It's only $90 right now and does a decent job for hobby type stuff. Most parts also need to be blasted to clean them up prior to powder coating so you'll want a blaster cabinet, and then you'll need an oven to back the parts in. For now I have a large toaster oven but I'm keeping an eye out on craigslist for a cheap/free oven to stick out in the garage. Powders are pretty cheap to, $15-$20 or a pound and you can do a lot with a pound. Like vinyl the real cost of powder coating is the initial hardware cost and then just time, the actual product is really cheap.

As others said, don't trace a font. From the image you posted however, looks like you also need to tweak your trace settings. It appears you were using either Color Quantization, or one of the Multiple Scans options. For a simple black and white image you want to use the Brightness cutoff. I usually start my threshold to 0.65 and the adjust as needed. Tweaking the items on the Option tab can help as well. But getting a good trace of a font is nearly impossible.

Don't know how vinylmaster works but in Inkscape I'd duplicate the cart then inkscape a box behind it and then use the difference tool, called punch in some software, and subtract the card from the box. then just delete the left over portions of the box that I don't need. There may be a better/easier way, but without seeing the vector file it's hard to say.

Grabbed them, thanks.

The bad firmware/checksum error is a plotter thing, nothing to do with windows. Have you tried downloading the firmware update again? Those error messages would indicate that the file you are trying to load is corrupted, or being corrupted during the load process.

Maybe tell us what cutter you have.

I like the putting measurements directly on the image, but I wouldn't count on them being very precise, to many places to introduce errors.

It was mentioned earlier, but kind of died away. Is it possible it's a heat problem? Something in the plotter over heating and stopping the system?

Goo Gone is safe on cars, aside from it saying so on their web page I've used it to remove sap from my vehicles a couple of times.

Can you post an example? What is the name of the font you are trying to use?

Just try a couple small test cuts and check for yourself if the line moves. Seems like a pretty easy thing to check out.

Interesting, thanks for the info.

If you could post that as an eps or svg I'd be happy to play around with it and see if I can turn it into something usable.

Wondered about that one. Since it was his name would it be something that would be protected? Although I think it was just a stage name, not a legal name, so probably would be protected. Also that Kobe shield logo would be a nono as well.

Interesting, wonder what exactly that is doing.

+1 on Dunlop and Showa logos as well Looks good though.

I don't use that software but I'm curious about the exporting of the file. You say you export it at 90dpi, but if it's a vector, dpi shouldn't come into play. DPI, Dot per Inch is a raster image term, or at least I've never heard it in reference to vectors. Does DPI here mean something else?

Shouldn't that one be on the front so the protestors know to get out of the way? ha!