Wildgoose

I'm with you Skarekrow. I have had great success with Signcut Pro. So much so that I dropped the proprietary cutting program that comes with Summa cutters (very similar to cutting master that Graphtec gives out) and went back to Signcut. Welcome to the Mac users guild AAndrew! I use CS5 as well. Great program.

I and many others were in the same spot you are in right now. I can tell you from personal experience that if you are willing to put in the effort you can make enough money to get your ROI very easily. Very easily! I went with a P-Cut originally because it was a little above the bottom and yet was still affordable to start with. There are a few things that you have to learn with a budget cutter but they aren't rocket science. A couple years into it and I dropped over $3K on a new one if that gives you any indication of profitability. If you are running the mac (I do too) you might look into SignCut Pro cutting software, it seems to be the most mac compatible cutting utility out there but it does basically no design so you have to have a design program of which there are several which are also friendly to mac. I happen to run Illustrator which is tough on beginners but Inkscape has a mac version and it's free and quite a few on here use Corel draw and they say it's easier to use so you have some options out there. I would steer you to Inkscape to start with just because it is totally free and a great program to have around even if you end up going some other route later.

Dawns husband, you had me fooled! LOL Here is me with all my girls. This is the reason I spend so many hours trying to make that extra buck!

I think that is Eurostile bold

I don't know, maybe its some sort of software glitch but mine used to do the same thing from time to time and I think it was static. Once I started killing the static it mellowed way out and would rarely do the "waiting" thing.

It's either a memory issue but I doubt that if you are just doing a single graphic. My money is on static electricity. P-Cuts are notorious for static problems. I ended up getting a can of the spray style anti-static cling stuff for ladies skirts that cured my woes. Just hose down the area around your cutter, especially behind it, before you do a big job.

My guys who run the pipe crews at my day job each have a honda in their truck. I forget the size but they use them to power misc drills and an electric impact gun and they get treated very poorly, thrown in the back of a truck and stuff stacked or dropped on them and they just keep going. Amazingly tough.

One of the many other uses of vinyl cutters is the making of blast resist patterns to etch glass and other awesome things. Do a search on sandblasting here on the site and you will see some of the results. It was recently a big hit and quite a lot of us invested in budget blast cabinets and started etching. Ton's of fun!

Have you contacted SignCut support? Those folks are great about getting you going. Sometimes they can walk you through it with a few emails or they will do a remote session and dial in if you are having any major issues. Maybe I am wrong but I think you can jog your cutter directly from the machine? I never had a laserpoint but I think it's a P-Cut based machine (which I did have). I never tried to do a contour cut so I am not a lot of help directly, sorry.

Good info! I totally hear ya and it makes sense with the special freaky inky that it would be compounded. I am sure I will use it some but would rather not have so much pressure to try and keep it busy. I like the relaxed approach.

So how does the Epson stack up to the Ricoh for dye sub? What model of Epson Madhatter?I have been thinking about getting one. Does the dye-sub ink have any problems sitting for a while. I have to keep my Epson WF30 pretty busy with the pigment ink to keep from getting clogs. Now too much trouble at my house, we just use it for everything and that seems to eliminate most of my problems but I won't be able to use the second one with any regularity.

I used to prefeed my P-Cut and that also let me know if it was actually straight or not as well as if I was at the end of a roll. The new Summa runs a prefeed of about 1.5 times the width and then cuts to that point and then does another automatically as it works through long designs so I am spoiled now.

Ya that sucks. I have started to mirror my files when I save them if they are heat press bound. That way when I open them up I go...hey thats already backwards and I both notice and can forget about it. Problem now is remembering to do that. LOL

So I have ran SignCut for years now and with my old cutter I always just cut from a windows laptop at the cutter and designed on my iMac in illustrator. Well I have since upgraded my cutter to a Summa and decided this year I would buy the dongle so I can have access to SignCut from either computer in case the windows crashes which it seems to do every once in a while. So up until now I have not used the SignCut plug-in in Illustrator. Now that I have it hooked to my computer directly instead of transferring files over by a thumb drive I am finding there are a whole slew of other features I have been missing out on! For instance, when hooked up direct I don't have to convert text to outlines. Nice! Also will cut right from my current version of AI rather than having to downsave to version 8. This may have been an option for quite a while but I just figured out that you don't have to do the downsave thing all the time which was an extra step and often a whole second file that I had to try to keep track of in my computer. Really loving the mac compatibility which was something that I was unable to find in almost any other cutting utility out there. Really happy with SignCut Pro and the support they give.

I think the program is converting the newer versions to an older one that it likes better.

I'm with you GC I don't like the thought of renting for the rest of my business life. However if the only houses that were for sale were 1970's split levels but you could rent a sweet brand new home with all the modern conveniences it would make you think about it. I have yet to take the plunge and still probably will even for just a test drive for a while. There is no huge expenditure option. You either pay $600 for a year or the monthly payment. I see your point about investing the money elsewhere and totally agree that if you can get by with cheaper it makes more financial sense to do so. You just can't get there with the cloud though. You either stay with the old programs or pay the price. Not every decision I make is based on if it makes sound financial sense, if I stuck with that I probably would never have stuck my neck out to try a vinyl cutter in the first place. This thread was started to draw some real user feedback on the new CC version which Moody Blue has been kind enough to grace us with. This isn't an abacus vs supercomputer comparison so the intent I had when I asked the first question was how cool are the apparent upgrades and has anyone been using them that can give me some feedback. If you think I was trying to talk down to you for some reason you are mistaken and I am sorry if my response made you feel that way.

Were cool. You are right they cost at least twice as much. I wish I had skills to deal with computers but it has never been my strong point. I have a nephew who lives in a nearby town that is a freak and if I get in real trouble I call in the calvary but I hate to bug him. My older brother is a computer programmer for some software company that writes specific programs for Boeing and he is the one that finally told me to just go spend the $$ on a mac and it was great advice. They are a little quirky with drivers but once you get everything hooked up I love them.

Just a "for instance"I have a decent quality laptop with windows 7 that I have had to shut down the auto update because if I let it update every tuesday it will crash completely. Blue screen. dead. I have not a clue how to deal with this. The only options I have are to con one of my more computer savvy friends into donating their time to help out or go pay the geek squad to figure it out. I ended up doing a startup in safe mode and doing a restore to get it to even open up again. This happened 4 or 5 weeks in a row until I finally figured out how to turn off the auto update. Why should an update crash my system? PIA

pic wasn't there at the time, sorry, I am a wiseacre sometimes.

I use citrus cleaner if there is old adhesive.

I have been converted from windows. Unless you have experienced it then you have no idea. The ONLY thing that I can see that would be a perk to windows is if you are a major computer geek who likes to modify stuff all the time and are capable of dealing with the crashes and don't mind an unstable system. I am not a computer geek/guru and get real frustrated when they start screwing up. All those issues pretty much went away with the purchase of my first mac which is still running three years later without any issues and it gets full time use as my design computer and full time use by 7 other people of varying ages and I can tell you from personal experience that those 7 other users have been the quick death of every other computer I have owned which typically was 12-18 months so don't be knocking my mac in the mac forum thats poor form buddy.

That sounds like a fun new toy. i have been thinking of upgrading my laptop to a Macbook Pro one of these days, I'll try to keep an eye on you to see how it preforms. I run an iMac desktop and just went with the standard 21 model and there have been times when crunching a 3D rendering that I wish I had went ahead and gotten the bigger processor. All you yahoos hard timing the mac need to pay attention that this was posted in the mac users forum. Mac rules!

Ya I have always saved to AI 8 and that was the norm back when I started using it.

That looks like die cut. Which is a different process where they have a press and dies and stamp them out.

I had a few extra moments to play. This isn't perfect but may be close enough to get you by. It will at least give you a starting point. CCWelding.eps