jmas

I use the free Zoho Invoice app on my Android phone. You can also use it through their website.

It wasn't exactly how I would have laid out the stripes, but that's the way the customer wanted them.

That's what happened. I work in a body shop and even small 1/16th vinyl pinstripes do that on fresh paint. We usually wait a month before applying larger graphics.

I work at a body shop so I don't do many signs but the original price looks good to me. I get smart with people like that and tell them it's not like a used car, there's no haggling. The price is the price. I'm not above lying and saying the materials alone are $150. Go in and order a $14.99 pizza and ask if they'll take $8 for it.

Oh yeah, here's another one I use sometimes. If you want to align the decal with a straight line and you have enough space on the vinyl, cut guides as part of the decal. For example, add squares to the design and when you are doing the install, place the squares right above the straight line of the truck. Finish installing the decal then take off the squares.

On really big weird things like this I usually look for a straight line, measure from it and put little pieces of tape to mark where the decal needs to go. It looks like the area I marked with a green line is all level in real life although it's not in the photo. I would measure up from the metal/body line, put little pieces of tape (green squares) about 1/8th of an inch from where the bottom of the decal needs to be and put the decal right above them.

The Wrapcut worked just as well as 3M. The only real difference is that the filament is near the edge of the tape instead of the middle. I had a harder time starting the pull with it at the edge as opposed to 3M filament which is in the middle, but I think it'll be fine with more practice. It stayed on the car even when I lifted and repositioned the vinyl several times and made a nice clean cut. All in all it seemed fine. I don't think I've used either enough to have a preference but Wrapcut is half the price of 3M so I think I'm going to keep play with the different Wrapcut and 3M tapes and see which I like for different things.

I've been using Linux for nearly 20 years, most of that time using Slackware, which can be a real pain at times. I've tried a few times over the past few years to get the cutter working but have given up on there ever being good cutter support. I guess there's never been much demand for it.

Another tip; with the new "save as PDF" option, you can go to this site and convert it to EPS (or other filetypes but EPS is the only one I care about): http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-eps I tried to convert the pdf to eps using other sites and this is the only one I could find that works. The eps from other sites would either fail to load or load as a single graphic that couldn't be ungrouped.

Here's another one I did last week. We painted the hood on it so that's the only stripes I had to replace. I used Avery wrap and Langeman Wrapcut on this one, that's why the tape is red instead of the Knifeless Tape's green color.

I used the white stuff (811?) on a car a couple years ago and while it worked fine, it was very thick and hard to work with. I have 813 now and it's easier to work with. I haven't painted with it myself though. I make stencils for another guy who does custom airbrushing and he says it works great.

I think putting this on the sliding door is your best bet: FREE FOOD Doing a little amateur measurement using your image, it looks like the window is slightly larger than twice the height of a letter. You might be able to keep the text the same size or squash it so little that the size difference wouldn't be noticed.

I was bored and decided to fill a little wall space in the garage. I've seen the first image going around online before, and decided to do a red/white/blue enhancement to it. I'm not thrilled with the black background. I had a 24x24 piece of wood that was painted white but the color would make the white stripes disappear so I decided to wrap it with something but couldn't really come up with anything except matte black.

Potatoes are a very important part of our country

I use this program http://www.findmyfont.com/ although I'd recognize the porsche font anywhere because it's very distinctive and I've worked with it before.

If you feel like learning, the fonts used are 911 Porscha for the small text and Hong Kong Hustle for the large text. You can install them, type the text in those fonts, size and align the text, add a star, and voila! It will most likely come out better than if you convert the image. http://www.dafont.com/search.php?text=uRMA&q=porscha http://www.dafont.com/search.php?text=uRMA&q=Hong+kong+hustle

I did another small knifeless tape job today. We repainted the quarter panel on this Fiat 500 and had to replace that one piece of the stripe. Normally I would have labored over the plotter and tested it with the pen attachment until I got the dimensions just right and finally cut the vinyl to be a perfect match, but I decided to have a little fun and cut the "500" lettering out of a rectangle of black 3M wrap vinyl, put it on the car, and used knifeless tape to cut out the proper shape. I put some transfer paper over the "500" to help get it on the car, worked out the wrinkles, and pulled the tape. It worked great. Ready to rip: After the cut: Peeling the extra: Finished:

I should have clarified that the problems with the corners were at the end of the cut, not the beginning. For the initial cut, I would put two fingers on each side of the vinyl and give the filament a tug and it cut like a charm but when I got to the end, the corners of the vinyl weren't stuck good because I did it wet and they would lift up and the filament wouldn't cut them straight. I quickly learned to hold the corners down at the end of the cut too. But this only happened because I did a wet install. A dry install with wrap vinyl would be super easy.

The knifeless tape worked great however I used Oracal 751 and did a wet install which made it more difficult to use the tape. When the tape gets wet it's really hard to get started pulling it, the little filament wants to separate from the tape instead of pulling straight through it. The corners of the vinyl also have to be stuck down really good or else they'll move and the tape will cut crooked in the corners. Other than that, when I was able to keep the tape dry, it worked just like it does in the videos. Easy peasy! The moral of the story is that I really should have used wrap vinyl with a dry install. I wasn't prepared. The customer called wanting a racing stripe and I asked if two 8 inch stripes with a 1 inch gap between them sounded good and they said yes. I cut that on my plotter but when I showed up that's not what they wanted at all. I had the tape and the roll of matte black with me so I tried it. It's definitely worth using knifeless tape a little bit to get used to it. I'm certainly no pro at it now but I think I could redo that car in half the time and I'm remembering other jobs where I should have used the knifeless tape in the past, but didn't because I had never used it and wasn't sure how well it would do.

Would it be simpler to buy pinstriping of the correct width and color than cutting your own?

There was another car in town that looked like my boss's and we can't have that can we? He had me black out the trim on his car. I didn't get many "before" pics, but you get the idea. I wrapped the trim around the windows, door handles, a trim piece across the trunk, the grille and 3 other pieces on the front using two yards of Avery gloss black wrap. It was a tedious pain in the butt but it was fun and the boss was happy.

They wouldn't accept bust? "Rust and bust" has a better ring to it. Or even, "Things rust and bust, don't wait 'til you must. Call the plumber you can trust"

Dang, they didn't have anything I really wanted but I could maybe put these to use: 2016 - CHEVROLET CORVETTE ( ChevC_816.ai ) 2016 - MINI COOPER SPORT ( MiniC_0018.ai )

I'm making some simple but large signs. Customer is supplying metal substrate, I'm cutting and applying vinyl (751), then they're installing the sign. I have my installation price, don't worry about that, and I have a price in mind for the vinyl, but I need a second opinion. The vinyl is just text, big fat extra bold text so design and weeding is negligible, cutting and masking is the main thing. The text has a white outline so all the measurements will basically be double. One text is 270 inches wide x 15 inches high letters. The other text is 5 groups of text with 18 inches tall letters. Widths are 72, 90, 168, 189 and 201 inches. Added together, that's 720 inches in width. So, big fat letters that are 270x15 inches, 720x18 inches, and x2 on everything for the outline. Let's see how far off I am lol

Wildgoose, does that include your install price or just vinyl? I wasn't far off. I figured $6/sqft which put it right at $1000. They're bringing me a metal substrate, I'll be cutting and installing the white outline and red lettering on top of that, then they'll take it and install the metal onto a building. I'm using a graphtec. I've done 12ft before and since these are 15-18 inches and the vinyl will be 24 inches, I shouldn't have problems with tracking. I'll still probably break it up into sections. Plus it's text, I can do it one letter at a time if I had to. The 270 inch one is also 3 words but the space between is small so I was figuring it as one big word.