ShaneGreen

Haumana, you are so right. They hardly teach any type of life skills any more at school and the kids aren't learning them at home. Our son was a Residence Assistant in college and he had a ton of stories about how unprepared this generation is. College kids who literally didn't know that they had to go to the store to buy toilet paper. OMG! First it was silk screen vellum and now I'm complaining about teenagers! By the end of the day I'll be yelling at some kids to get off my lawn!!!

Does anyone remember the old days of hand cutting vellum for silk screening? I think the stuff was called maskease or easymask. A green gelatin on clear plastic and you had to cut the gelatin and weed it without cutting the plastic carrier. Then you chemically melted the gelatin to the screen, but I don't really remember how. For a while in the 70's and 80's a lot of the schools in Illinois made every 7th and 8th grade student take HomeEc and Industrial Arts. It was really a great program, at the end two years everyone, boys and girls, new how to cook, sew, create a budget, do basic wood working, draft and silkscreen. Took me nearly the whole quarter to draft the design and cut the screen for my T-shirt. Cutting that stuff was a nightmare but you were sure proud of your work when you were done. A few years later I stumble across "photo reactive masking" in a DickBlick catalog and couldn't believe how much time I could have saved, LOL.

Is it happening at a spot where the blade should be raising? Pinball machines will make that same noise when a bumper switch sticks or the diode burns out on one. The electro magnet pulsates at high speed and sounds just like that.

I've got in three rolls of 3m Scotchlite 5100-85, the red and black seem to cut fine but I'm struggling with this white. LaserPoint II with a new Cleancut-60 blade (blade height set to Ms Skeeterz standards, as always). For reference, Oracal 651 cuts at 75-110 grams of force (depending on color) and 400mm/sec. The reflective black and red are doing fine at 400grams of force and 100mm/sec. Four times the force and slow, it's what I expected. But this white....500grams 100mm/sec and two passes and even then it's tough to weed. The next step up in speed is 200mm/sec and it won't cut cleanly at any pressure with that speed . The attached picture is what happens at 200mm/sec OR with just one pass OR any pressure below 500grams. The left side of the picture shows the front of the decal. It's an oval with a bison in the middle. The right hand side is the back of vinyl after it comes off the carrier sheet (the sticky side). So anything below 500gm, 100mm/s, two passes and this is what I get: - The front looks like it makes a nice clean cut. - The rear looks like a nice clean cut. If you take it off the backing, like in the picture, it separates right where it should. - The carrier sheet shows a defined indentation every place you cut. - Lots of trash builds up on the blade tip with just this little 2x3 decal. - It's hard to get it to start weeding and then as you're pealing it off it will rip. Seriously, it's easier to rip the vinyl then it is to weed it on the cutline. - Any thin sections won't stay stuck to the backing once it's weeded. Something like a flame is completely impossible. The other colors aren't doing this. - I have a 0.050 weed box around it. About 80% of the box weeds fine and then short sections will either not weed or the top layer comes off leaving the reflective bottom layer behind. I thought about putting transfer tape on it, removing the carrier and weeding that way to see what would happen. It would sure make multi-layered images a pain. Should the white be this much different from the red and black? Am I stuck with multiple passes at turtle speed? Any recommendations?

I originally used the same blade height as the red and black, but reset it later. It did seem to need another 1/4 turn of the nut to leave a reasonable impression on the carrier sheet.

Thanks, I'll have to check into that Ross blade. Yes, I bought an extra holder and CleanCut blade just for the reflective. I'm expecting to do quite a bit of it. That's why I was hoping to figure out how to cut this at a little faster speed. 100mm/s @ 2X is basically 50mm/sec so it will take nearly a minute just to do the weedbox on a 24x24.

The vinyl just came in 2 weeks ago from Feller and the blade is brand new. I'll give 3x a shot and see what happens. Just ran some red at 400g 200mm and 2X and it was as bad as the white, it just got done twice as fast. 100mm may be the best speed I"m going to get. Repeated that test at 3X and it was good.

Measuring a couple of images on Google it looks like the two smaller ones total 1.5X wide and the larger is 2.4X. That happens to match up with the Golden Ratio, so it's quite likely that's what they started with. If you apply the Golden Ratio to the 1.5X, then the two smaller ones would be 0.6x and 0.9x Measuring on my monitor is super inaccurate, but that sure seems to be what they are. If you look around on Amazon and eBay there people are making them in all sorts of ratios and total widths, so what do I know?

Ignore the lines, they seldom line up front-to-back. Place your vinyl against a line on the front that you can see and then have the plotter feed it forward a few feet. If the vinyl starts to stray, release the pinch rollers and adjust it a little. Repeat until it's feeding straight. The first hundred times it seems to take forever, but before long it becomes second nature. A few other useful hints I picked up from others on the board... - Never, ever, ever put your vinyl all the way to one side or the other, it has to have room to move. - Use all of your pinch rollers. - Make sure your pinch rollers are clean, top and bottom. A stray piece of vinyl (or dog hair, in my case) will dent the vinyl at best. At worst, it throws off the tracking. - Manually unroll more vinyl than you need and leave it hanging between the back of the plotter and the roll. If the machine has to pull it off the roll it will make a big old mess.

Haumana is right, VM allows you to manually set the port: In VM >File >Cut/Plot >Vinyl Spooler > pop up window appears. Right hand side of pop-up has 4 tabs. Click on "Connection." Under "connection Method" I have "Direct Com Port." Then for "Settings" you can try "auto select" but it doesn't always find something. I manually set it to "USB Serial Port (COM5)". Be sure the baud rate is correct or it may just sit there and do nothing. My LPII is set to 9600. To find which USB port your computer is using, in that same pop up click "system" and then "device manager" in the top tool bar. In the new pop up scroll down to "Ports" to see what the computer has found.

Both "o" of the eight and threes are cut in 8 equal segments. I'm with Wildgoose on this one.

Has anyone tried using a guillotine cutter for trimming vinyl? If it cuts cleanly you'd have nice square corners. Don't know if it would save any time. Just one of those thoughts that's been gnawing at me.

Many towns have watermain shut offs along the streets or sidewalks that are anywhere from 3"-8". Most of them were sand castings so it was no big deal to customize them with the cities name or even their logo. Like "Seneca Water Auth." or "Brookfield Addition". At an art fair in Batesville, AR last year they were printing the watermain on the shirt sleeve and the manhole on the body. I think it was a $10 donation to the Arts Council. It was really cool.

My LPII has a different cable than that, with a different part number. E256404

I run a LPII off of a usb cable and have no problems (but others have) and VinylMaster Pro. It will run a 45 minute job (a dozen different decals set up as one cutfile), I change out vinyl colors and run another cutfile, multiple times, without needing to reboot anything. The same computer may also have 4 or 5 other programs open at the same time. Now I did have one issue I've ran into a couple of times you can look for. While it's cutting I've gone to another screen like File Explorer or Inkscape. When I go to cut again it either appears locked up or wants to cut the same thing again. What would happen is that VM had given a pop-up alert box but since I had another program open, the pop-up was buried and I didn't see it. The program couldn't operate until I took care of the pop-up. So next time it locks up look down in your task bar and see if VM may have an extra screen open that you don't see.

I wonder how well the vinyl rolls will hold up sitting in a vehicle for days. The heat can get pretty high. They ship UPS | FedEx | USPS so they can handle it for a couple of days, but I wonder about longer term. Anyone have any experience?

Under "Tools" there is a "Weedbox Offset" that controls how big the weedbox is around an image. I forget what the default is, but I changed mine to 0.05in. I could swear there is a setting for how much room it leaves between them if you are cutting multiples, but I can't find the setting. In the cut spooler you can click "settings" and "tight packing" and that will reduce the space between multiple images....but only for this cut. You'll have to reset it each time you go to cut something.

Slice&Dice, you're right, "smooth" probably wasn't the right word to use. It has the long lines from the ribs, but the surface has no other texture so the vinyl adheres really well. From 5 feet away it you don't really notice the corrugations unless you're looking for it.

Sheets of coroplast. Lightweight, smooth, relatively cheep and holds up to handling. http://corrugatedplastics.net/

I had to adjust the offset to 0.25 and it had been at 0.40. The difference was incredible. You won't regret going with Clean Cut!

Recently there was a thread where we discussed the merits of different blades. I cut the same image with a standard 45 and then with a Clean Cut 60...HUGE difference. I'll never go back. http://forum.uscutter.com/index.php?/topic/54960-small-lettering/&

Try making an image that's full width and an inch high (so you don't waste a bunch of vinyl). Make a box with a repeating shape or letter in it. If it's a mechanical problem, you should see the issue start to appear as it moves to the left.

Once you have the "test" pattern showing nice square corners, open up VinylMaster and create a new file. Add a circle, square, and triangle from the pre-designed shapes. Then put some text in different fonts and sizes around it. Try cutting that. If you're using one of the fonts supplied with Vinylmaster then you can be assured that it's not the file. I fought with really rough cut text and found that the files I was using were just poor tracing like Mz Skeeter said. To make matters worse, when I created a testing file I picked a "hand drawn" font the first time around....stick with something straight and universal, like Arial.

Wildgoose, do they use that same plastic finish on atvs? My wife had an Arctic cat that wasn't a problem, but everything would fall off my Polaris after a month. We don't 4-wheel anymore, but have lots of friends who do, and they've talked about getting some decals made.

The VinylMaster Features and Comparison chart says that Pro has "worksheets". Watching the videos and using the help menu, they show an option for "Master Pages" on the tool menu and under the "Layout" tab. These links should open a menu containing "clone master pages" so that you can create a worksheet. My VM Pro V4.0 updated 12/19/17 doesn't have those "Master Pages" links. I can turn on thumbnails and set a page as a Master Page, but I can't find a link to "clone master pages" anywhere. Any ideas? FYI, a "worksheet" is sort of like a catalog page. It can show multiple images on one page that are dynamically linked to the real image. So, right now I'm doing 4 designs for a church camp. Printing out the worksheet will show them what all 4 look like. If I go in and change the color on an image, the worksheet is automatically updated to the new color. You can also add notes, so I could add prices or options to the page. It would be a really handy feature. . .if I can figure out where they hid the sub-menu. Here is their video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hJn3giocYE