eprcvinyls

My Vinyl doesnt like sticking to the backing, if replaced

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Okay, Im not sure if i am the only one who sometimes in weeding there vinyl they just cut that sometimes letters peel up and just dont want to stay down or couple times i didn't even realize i was peeing up some of my letters or words.so i have just been re cutting what is needed but when we go to peel it off the new cut and place it on the original cutting sometimes they just refuse to stick to it, is there something i can do to make it stick?

i cut out the other day a Red Dawg for my truck ( My old CB handle) and the Red and D did great but the W in awg messed up so i just re cut the whole AWG cause the font i had they were connected together. but with it i just cut it way down and took some clear packing tape folded it over itself and stuck to the vinyl backing lined it up then put the transfer tape over the whole thing that worked out really good doing it like that but lots of time it just be a single letter in a word or something.

 

any advice. besides being sure that when weeding all letters stay down.. not sure why some weed really good and others don't.

 

Thanks

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I'm not clear what you were doing with the packing tape, but in regards to sticking vinyl back onto the backing paper, yeah, that will never stick as well as before. The idea of the backing paper is that vinyl doesn't stick to it.

I have had to do as you describe though, messed up a small part of a design so rather than cut the whole design just cut what I need. So long as you're not waving the backing paper around after you lay the vinyl on it, the vinyl should stay put well enough to get your transfer tape applied.

I've actually built multi colored decals like that. I cut the entire design in one color, weeded out everything except that color, then cut the other colored parts and using the slight impression left on the backing paper from the first cut used them to line up the other pieces. This way I was able to get a multi color design that was a uniform thickness.

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4 hours ago, darcshadow said:

I'm not clear what you were doing with the packing tape, but in regards to sticking vinyl back onto the backing paper, yeah, that will never stick as well as before. The idea of the backing paper is that vinyl doesn't stick to it.

I have had to do as you describe though, messed up a small part of a design so rather than cut the whole design just cut what I need. So long as you're not waving the backing paper around after you lay the vinyl on it, the vinyl should stay put well enough to get your transfer tape applied.

I've actually built multi colored decals like that. I cut the entire design in one color, weeded out everything except that color, then cut the other colored parts and using the slight impression left on the backing paper from the first cut used them to line up the other pieces. This way I was able to get a multi color design that was a uniform thickness.

I just put it on the back of the new cut and used the whole sheet i cut out to tape to the existing cut i had to redo. hope that makes since

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If it's a self install I just cut the fix part and install it in a second application step. If it's something for a customer then they might not appreciate the missed letters and having to apply them after the fact. 

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You'll probably get better with some practice so that it doesn't happen as often.

Always pay attention to the "direction" the design is facing. Try to avoid peeling directly perpendicular toward the long part of a letter, for example a capital "L." Peeling left to right puts a lot of pressure all along the long part of the L and may be enough to lift it up. I'd prefer to peel from lower left so that I hit the L at the pointy part. You want to peel an "e" right to left so you peel away that little bit of vinyl inside the lower part of the e with the rest of the vinyl. Going left to right, it will leave that bit of vinyl, but as you pass the e, that bit may lift up and take the rest of the letter with it. On the other hand, other letters like a "g" need to be pulled the other direction.

None of this is set in stone. Using my examples, peeling the word "Leg" would be virtually impossible. In reality, I usually start in a corner and peel at an angle. From there I can adjust the direction I'm peeling if I need to. If I get to a certain shape and want to pull right to left, I start doing that. Then if I get to another that will peel better from bottom to top, I do that. And if I get to one that I'm pulling from completely the wrong direction, I just hold it down with my finger and peel away.

It sounds harder and more involved than it is. With practice, you'll just look at a design and start peeling from the best direction without even thinking about it.

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As a rule, weeding letters is done from right to left and numbers from left to right.

Also, if your weeding doesn't leave the letters on the backing, then it's possible that your blade is tearing the vinyl and not slicing/clean cutting. Make sure the blade is not jammed up with small shreds of vinyl and that it freely spins (a drop of sewing machine oil in the bearing is a good thing)

I see no reason to slow down a cutter speed from the max setting. The faster the better, IMO.

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I tend to weed from left to right and sometimes flip the design around so some letters weed easier as mentioned by both Slice and jmas but there are no hard and fast rules. I use a sharp but smooth pointed tweezer in one hand to help hold down trouble letters while I pull the main part up with the other hand. It sounds complicated but it's not. Everyone comes up with a system that works best for them.  You can reach inside of of problem letters with a tweezer or other tool and actually hold tricky parts in place as you pull the outside off around them like dots on I's for instance. 

Hopefully Slice was being snide about the max cutter speed but you never know.  Even a budget cutter is a very fine tuned machine (and less hardy) and IMO most cutting is best done at a respectable speed. My summa will cut up to 800mm/sec but I usually cut at 200. Bear in mind that 200 on the Summa is pretty fast and it has additional settings that speed up movement between cuts when it's traveling to the next letter which also speeds up overall production. I watched a video on a Titan cutting at 400 and that was about the same speed mine runs at 200 so there are some subjective numbers there that may or may not represent actual speeds or are measured some other way. Servo cutters are going to be able to cut at higher speeds and maintain accuracy better than the stepper motors but I still like to take care of my stuff so it will last as long as possible. I never had good luck with my budget cutter going above about 120mm/sec. 

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Thanks everyone, well i found one trick yesterday, if i have something with multiple words I just barly cut the vinyl between each word and i id one word at a time it worked much better for me. I am sure more i do it better faster i will get

 

 

 

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45 minutes ago, eprcvinyls said:

Thanks everyone, well i found one trick yesterday, if i have something with multiple words I just barly cut the vinyl between each word and i id one word at a time it worked much better for me. I am sure more i do it better faster i will get

 

 

 

That's also a good idea for large designs that aren't gong to lift. If you're halfway through peeling a 10 ft design, it's not very easy to keep that 5 ft of sticky vinyl away from everything. Heck, that's sometimes true even for a 2x2 ft design.

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3 hours ago, jmas said:

That's also a good idea for large designs that aren't gong to lift. If you're halfway through peeling a 10 ft design, it's not very easy to keep that 5 ft of sticky vinyl away from everything. Heck, that's sometimes true even for a 2x2 ft design.

Yeah, i did a 12"X12"yesterday but it had lots of stuff on it so cutting away each word and the pic helped.

 

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Some cutting software has settings that will add extra cuts like this automatically to make weeding easier. 

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11 hours ago, darcshadow said:

Some cutting software has settings that will add extra cuts like this automatically to make weeding easier. 

Yeah, one of mine did it but i forget what I turned on to make it split them in the center

 

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It's usually called something like "extra weed lines". The guys that use VM should be able to tell you where to find it easily.

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On 2/21/2018 at 7:45 AM, darcshadow said:

Some cutting software has settings that will add extra cuts like this automatically to make weeding easier. 

The software will add it for you? Dang, I've been doing it manually - I call them relief cuts, because it relieves the stress when I actually remember to put them into some designs. I'm usually pretty good about putting them with simple text. Some of the multi-colored designs looks like an old school road map with all my relief cuts to deal with the designs and open/uncut vinyl areas. One of the fastest and best lessons I learned was welding and relief cuts <- they're life savers!

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