Wilson

I think the challenge is these aren't regular keychains. They're basically a piece of foam with some type of smooth covering. I believe this is the type of keychain she is talking about: Floating Keychain I'd try some 751 or 951 to see if the cast vinyl held up better with the squish or the keychain.

I don't know about tissue boxes... but 6x9 speaker boxes held down with Velcro do hurt really bad in an accident... LOL

You might try the Color Theory Multiverse while you're at it (https://www.uscutter.com/Color-Theory-Multiverse-Heat-Transfer-Vinyl). I haven't tried this yet but it's supposed to apply in 3 seconds to cotton.

Use the lever on the back of the pinch rollers to move them up/down. Once they are up they should move freely side to side.

Go to my comment on this post to see some small text from an SC... http://forum.uscutter.com/index.php?/topic/57004-so-how-small-can-a-vinyl-cutter-cut/&tab=comments#comment-454087 That's with the 45-degree blade that came with the machine and the setup was from learning on this forum. So the machine is capable of doing it.

Not familiar with your software but are you using the jog buttons to adjust vinyl position and then using the origin button to set the origin on the cutter?

I would check the cutting strip again. If it were me, I would load enough material to do two cuts. Do one regular, advance a little & reset origin and then one rotated 90 degrees. Now see if the problem area is the same location on the axis the cutter head travels. If it is, your cutting strip is not level which may be why it seams like your force is changing mid-cut.

If you think of the carriage head / blade as the X-axis and the vinyl feeding in/out as the Y-axis... the more travel on the Y-axis the less accurate it is. So if you were to just do a simple rectangle that is 6-inch on the X-axis and 5-feet on the Y-axis... you start at the origin and go 5-feet (Y), 6-inch (X), 5-feet (Y) and 6-inch (X). With a high end servo machine you'd your blade would be back at origin... with a cheap stepper machine it will not, it will be off. And where it's "off" will be throughout your whole design when it's cut. If you can live/work with that, then you should be fine. If you need it to be really accurate then probably not. Personally, if it were me and I couldn't justify the increased cost of at least the SC over the MH, and if I was only buying the cutter to do some stencils for one car, I'd do the design and then pay a sign shop to cut and tape it.

Inkscape will do a lot of what Adobe Illustrator can do... and it's free. Wonder if you could export as a dxf, import that into Inkscape and then node edit to fix all it issues with the dxf file?

Can you export a .eps file out of MasterCam? I know nothing about MasterCam but if you've already got a usable file in that format I would try to get it exported out of MasterCam into a .eps/.svg/.ai/etc. that you may be able to import into Inkscape/Adobe Illustrator/etc. Once you get the file taken care of you're probably gonna need something better than a cheap cutter to get the kind of tolerance you're looking for.

From my experience with the paper test it was WAY to light of pressure. I've done some shirts at that pressure that looked alright (because I didn't know what I was looking at) and started to peel when being worn or washed once. I would invest in the temp gun. I ran the calibration test on my press when I first got it and mine ended up not being too bad (maybe 5* F), especially for a cheap clam but I've seen a lot people say theirs were off 20* - 30* F. Here's two things that helped me the most: 1.) Somewhere along the line I read that with Siser Easyweed (and Easyweed Stretch to some extent) when the pressure & temp are right and you look closely you should be able to see the texture of the fabric in the vinyl. Those first shirts I did weren't even close to this. Maybe Wildgoose or someone that does a lot more HTV than me can confirm this. 2.) I wear a white cotton T-shirt under my Polos for work everyday. So I bought a new 10 pack of shirts and then cut out text "Sample 1" through "Sample 10" in Easyweed Stretch and then experimented with temp & pressure using the paper test as my starting point. Worked great with minimal expense and it doesn't matter what the shirts looked like cause they're always covered up anyway.

First thing I would do is try using a Windows PC to eliminate the IMac. I'm not an Apple guy but as far as cutters go they seem like they cause more problems than what they're worth.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't part of the reason this seems daunting is because you're not real comfortable with the software yet and don't know exactly how to do this? If it were me, I'd either do what Slice suggested or just start laying and aligning circles. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes either way. Personally, as easy as this is I'd stay away from a pre-done vector I found on the web because you could run into more problems if the person messed that graphic up.

Make sure you come back after you replace the blade holder and let us know if it worked!

Is the problem always repeatable or is it random? For example, will it always cut sheet #2 fine and always screw up the other two? And are sheet 1, 2 & 3 all the same image (that you posted above)? If the same image, take sheet 2 and add/subtract to recreate others and save as a new file and see if that helps. If the images are different, I'd look at your wireframe and see if you have some crazy amount of nodes or any outliers.