Wildgoose

I do an average of 10 shirts an hour with front and back graphics. (this includes design, cut and weed time) You can knock those out in an evening if you aren't afraid to stay up a little late. I do it all the time. Sleep when your dead. LOL

Hey it finally happend! Well there you go theresat. In signcut you just click the tiling pallet and insert tiling lines wherever you want them and there is a setting that you decide how much overlap you want to have (I use 1/4") and make sure you are cutting a weeding border and you are done. At the start you need to have the vinyl width in the program and it will tell you if there is a problem with the width of tile you are wanting to do. You can also tile around a specific small piece if you screwed something up and x-out all the rest and just cut one little piece of the design. Super handy and hopefully SCALP tiling will work as well. I wouldn't count on it though....did I just say that out loud?

cdugger, interesting concept but I think you are missing some data. I don't know if you are very familiar with AI or not but on the sign building side of things (which uses a relatively small part of the programs true capability) the differences between the various versions aren't going to make much difference in productivity. Kind of like the difference between the old 10B and the 10BII. In some instances having the the old standby that you are really comfortable with may even be faster than the new bells and whistles. Even an, as you put it, "archaic" version of AI like CS2 in the hands of someone who understands the program is a formidable tool still on par with every other vector design tool out there. The newer versions are even more amazing but ultimately for vinyl work only a few differences exist and they are just simplified ways of doing old functions. For instance in CS6 they changed the tracing engine (which some claim doesn't work as good as CS5) and they added gradient stroke capability. Well for vinyl the gradient strokes is a non issue unless you are a printer and even then in CS5 you just have to expand the stroke and then you can apply a gradient to it so, while handy, it doesn't justify the cost of upgrading. The CC version has a few more drastic changes that are really sweet but ultimately there was still a way to do the same thing but it was slightly more time consuming. If you are doing complicated investment calculations you would have to narrow down how often one used the upgraded items and how much time they actually save and I think in the end the biggest reason for upgrading won't be a production based decision, it will boil down to version compatibility and other reasons. For me it may simply be having the new version just to have the new version but that's not a good reason from a financial prospective. If you are a full on graphic design guy who uses all the other programs that come with the adobe suite then it's a different thing all together.

Um, you're new judging by your post count. I don't have time to help with it right now but this is something simple enough that you can trace it by hand. I assume you are using SCALP as your design tool but I think you can get it done even in that program. With the picture in the program I recommend rotating it to a normal view and you should be able to decrease the opacity to about 50% then lock the layer and start a new layer. Use the pen tool and draw right down the edges of the number and letters. The welding you can probably find a very similar font to either substitute or use as a base to modify and tweak. Try Impact as the font. I would even try using a cap C and just grab all the nodes except the far left and slide the rest over to recreate the C's as well. You might try downloading Inkscape, it's free and will handle this better than SCALP will.

I haven't had my copy of SCALP for a while but if I remember correctly they have not gotten around to adding tiles yet. About the only way I had much success was making the cutting mat size the size of the vinyl you will be cutting and sliding the design off the side and it will only cut what is on the mat. Then you scoot it over and do another section. That's probably not the advice you are looking for but it was the best way I found when I used that program. Seems like it wouldn't cut through the design right at the point where it left the mat so you have to take an exactor to it. If I were you I would try a free 7 day trial of SignCut Pro and it will slice it right up for you with built in overlap and every thing.

I have CS5 and have kept track of the upgrades. CS6 has a nice interface and is beautiful compared to CS5 but there are only a couple very minor upgrades and def not worth the cost to do it. I see a lot pf practical application (for a sign only guy like myself) in the CC version of AI, as you say moody, the rest of the pallet is really aimed at other end users (with the exception of PS as Skarekrow has proven here on the forum). So I won't be using the bulk of the programs but the text tools and the new live corners would be awesome. I am really pissed that they don't have an option to purchase a cd with the program on it. That really bites for those of us who don't necessarily need to stay as updated as you guys who do full time graphic design. I am planning to upgrade my laptop to a macbook one of these days and I will likely give the CC a whirl. I have the mac version of AI CS5 that I can always fall back on if I get tired of paying monthly installments. I also have a copy of CS2 on several other computers as an emergency option but there are enough things missing from CS5 that I hate to use the older version. It's surprising how much you use some of those upgrades and I may find myself in the same boat with CC and hating to get by without the extras that it offers and the continued upgrades that they will likely keep coming out with as it goes along.

I grabbed one of each too. Thanks guys!

I think it's $50 a month but if you are a student or are a parent of a student then you can qualify for student pricing for $20 a month at this link: http://www.academicsuperstore.com/students I am probably going to be putting my kids through a rigorous home study program dealing with the adobe suite when the time comes.

I finally had a fee weekend to finish off the rest of the bumper build. Turned out ok.

I built a new bumper so I could mount a winch on my 96 Lancruiser and put one of those HF Badlands winches on there that you can pick up for $300. The write-ups rave about the things and I can't justify the cost of a Warn on it so I just built a Warn sticker. He he he To tell the truth these kinds of projects are the real reason I ever bought a cutter in the first place.

There are a lot of us from this side of the globe yes but there are plenty from other parts.

I bet you would be fine.

Oddly enough the thin vinyl is the good stuff. There are two main types of vinyl. Calendared and Cast. The thick it typically calendared. It starts out like sort of like a roll of pizza dough and gets rolled out thin and after it it cures it gets cut to width. Cast is mixed up like a polymer and sprayed and then eventually cut into widths. The calendared has a natural tendency to want to shrink back toward it's original size where the cast is already there. Cast is a little more delicate when cutting and weeding but far more conformable and able to handle the expansion and contraction that happens to most surfaces like glass, car doors etc...

I am surprised your cutter doesn't have a serial port. Mine even came with a cable. Should be right beside the usb 1 plugin. The Keyspan is just to convert from a usb at your computer to the serial cable on that end of the connection. I bought an adapter but couldn't find the Keyspan brand and the one i bought didn't work so be sure to get one that people have had success with (assuming you can find the serial port on your machine to even use)

There is no such animal or almost every one of us here would already have one. I have seen used or refurbished machines in the $8,000 range but they were usually older machines that may have had tech support or parts issues. Most that I have seen were well above the $10,000 range.

Quirks would include the usb connection issues it looks like you are already finding and static electricity will glitch it out. Limitations, tracking is poor, the motherboard (or something) doesn't like to do huge volumes of cuts such as may hundreds of copies of the same design. I managed to get by with the usb cable. many here suggest using the serial port or a Keyspan adapter. I couldn't find a name brand Keyspan adapter and ended up doing ok with the regular cable connected to a windows 7 laptop. I never left the cable hooked up, only plugged it in when I wanted to cut and it seemed fine. The tracking was easy to work with while using SignCut Pro because it has step-by-step cutting so on long graphics it will just cut everything in a user defined length (I used between 10 and 12 inches) before moving on. This doesn't work with text. Turn it off for text or you will have a mess. On long text runs I made sure I ordered my lettering so that it would flow through letter by letter rather than jumping around. I was only able to get SignCut to allow me to do this and I am not sure if the newer versions even have that still working. (I have since upgraded machines and no longer pay any attention to any of these things) Static electricity can be dealt with by spraying some anti-static cling spray like women use on their skirts around the machine before cutting The limited memory or whatever the issue with multiple copies I just only cut about 10 copies of anything. Sometimes you have to just shut it down for a couple minutes and then reboot in order to get it going again. To tell the truth it was mainly this issue that pushed me to getting a new machine. I had a ha t order with 1500 cuts to make and I knew I was in for trouble so I bought a new machine while the hats were coming and boy was I glad. Like I said once you learn to deal with these little issues you can do some pretty good work with the P-Cut but you have to sometimes be patient with it and remember that it was a cheap machine. I never had great success with tiny cutting or things that needed the tracking to be super accurate like large multi-layered stuff that each successive layer had to be perfect to match up the the lower ones.

I ran a CT 1200 for over 2 years and there is nothing wrong with that machine once you learn the quirks and limitations.

Is that CS6 or CC version? Mine is also a little older and the layout is a little different but there should be either some pull downs or a whole separate pallet that may be named "tracing options" It will have options to adjust the threshold, minimum area, path fitting, corner angle etc... you can dial in a lot with these. That same set of tools will let you save a custom preset so you don't have to go through that every time for similar tracings.

Ya that's awesome and a lot of work....I can't remember what else I was gonna say 'cause I got distracted by the art....

Are you related to Jed Clampett? That sounds like something he might have said. You know, The banker says "That statement was redundant." Jed says "Yeah, and he said the same thing twice in a row!" LMAO Sorry to pick on you xp. Couldn't resist

Sweet. So it is cross platform compatible from your work pc to home imac for the file sharing/sync? That's super cool! I can tell just looking at the examples that the new text tools are amazing and real handy.

Here is a giff with black background. You should be able to do these yourself if you have illustrator. Just get it looking like you want then in the file menu choose "save for web and devices" and it will let you choose all sorts of formats.

There are several options out there to find free fonts. Even fonts you purchase sometimes have restrictions. If you are just producing a product like a t-shirt to sell I think it is a little less of a big deal than building someone a logo that they will use for their business. If I am doing a logo I take a little extra time to research the font choice and make sure I'm not getting myself or the future owner of the logo into a jam. The other thing to consider on fonts, your computer will not like you if you download the 10,000 free fonts database. Say hello to crash. I have a font manager that is supposed to help out but even with it I am stuck at around 2000 fonts to have my computer work without problems. There are a lot of duplicates with different names and a lot that aren't very conducive to cutting.

Nice work

That file had a bunch of layers that were making regular actions not work properly so I can see where it would be confusing. Heck Illustrator is confusing enough on it's own. Practice, practice, practice right?