CarolinaTraffic

Recently a customer asked me to install bronze lettering on a wall out in front of a new community in town. I have looked online and found several places like impactsigns.com and woodlandmanufacturing.com that will make the letters for you. I remembered that a few of you guys had installed similar lettering before and was hoping you could offer some guidance as to the best place to get the letters or any installation tips that might be helpful. Also, the customer asked for an arrow to go below some existing lettering and I haven't seen symbols as options on the sites I mentioned. I'm looking for 5" tall 1/2" thick brushed finish bronze lettering in times new roman font that will be installed offset from the wall by maybe 1/2" or so

I also made her one of these lady golfer decals a few weeks ago. Now all of her friends from the women's golfing group want decals for their cars and golf carts so I made a stack of them in a bunch of colors as well.

So I decided to make a quick Mother's Day gift since I'm going to see my parents for the weekend. One of the hardest things was finding glass with no maker's marks on the clear bottom. I used a mirror image vinyl stencil on the bottom of the dish then etched it with an air eraser then used rub n' buff to color the etch The dish is actually pretty big, the etching itself is a little over 6" x 6"

Welcome from NC

Nice. Looks good.

Wow, thanks, that was fast. I didn't consider that one of the letters may have been modified but that sure looks like it.

Anyone know what font this is? I went to several different font ID websites and tried to figure it out and I searched though everything I have. I just can't seem to place it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Andrew

Well those are pretty sweet. What methods do you use to get the clean multi depth effect?

Yeah that's my problem. Every time I think I have most of what I want to keep me busy for a while I see something on here that I realize I "need" . Once I figured out how relatively easy and cheap it is to etch I just couldn't help myself. First I saw a bunch of the "KICK ASSEROLE" dishes on etsy and I knew I wanted to figure out the etching process. Then I saw Louis & Clarke's Christmas present thread and his liquor bottles and the next day I went and bought the air eraser -- soon to be upgraded to a blast cabinet. I think I'll swing by my local sign supply shop tomorrow and beg for remnants of anything better suited to wrapping and masking than the stiff Greenstar junk and some better app tape. ( I'm sure I can think of plenty more stuff I could use from them too) I already went to Dollar Tree today and got some beer and wine glasses. I plan to make some personalized growlers for some of my brewer friends. And I'm not even going to start the list of monogrammed crap my wife wants me to make for all of her friends. I don't know why everyone seems to want to get married and have babies all at the same time.

I think I will most likely take both of yall's advice. Blasting with a respirator and face shield is less than ideal, so I think the blast cabinet is the next thing on the list. The Harbour Freight eraser worked surprisingly well though even though I was using my smaller compressor. I was just kinda excited to get started and didn't have an inline air regulator to tone down my big compressor that supplies my whole shop. I did seem to go through a lot of AO though, I felt like I was filling up the little cup more often than should have been necessary. Also the crappy Greenstar vinyl I was using to mask with didn't wrap around the curved glass surface very well. I was still pleased with the results and didn't have any bleeding because of that but I would imagine that Oracal or a thinner more wrap friendly vinyl would have worked better

All this talk about etching glass got me a little ancy. So I decided to go grab an air eraser and give it a shot. These are my first three efforts and I think they turned out all right given it was my first try. I plan to make some Christmas presents for some family and friends so I wanted to get some practice under my belt in preparation. The first try was a simple word down the side of a 22oz beer bottle. The second was a little bigger on a 1 gallon cider bottle I use for making starters when brewing beer. And the last was a transparent clip board. On the clip board I mirrored the image and blasted it in reverse on the back side so the writing surface would remain smooth.

I had a package delivered to my old home address that I must assume was stolen by some kids. After I filed the claim with fedex I never got my package replaced and fedex decided that they would no longer deliver to that address because it was a risk since one theft had already been documented there. This was in a country club in the nice part of town. I only use ups now if I have a choice, luckily I haven't had any problems since that incident a few years ago. In the end the conclusion I came to was that if it is important or expensive spring for the insurance, if not just count it as a loss, cause the $80 your package costs is not going to be worth you hassle or future headache.

looks good

Nice, thanks for the responses. After much debate and reading a bunch on this forum I went ahead and ordered my first cutter. I did go with the SC 50“. One of the things I plan to use it for is cutting single use custom stencils for painting on asphalt in parking lots. That's why I went with the larger machine, plus there is plenty of room in my shop so space isn't an issue. I plan on using it with a laptop so once it gets here I'm going to just try it out with the USB and see if I'm really going to need to buy a keyspan or serial pcmcia card. I've been reading a bunch of stuff on here for a while and debating the different machines, I feel like this machine should serve my needs well. I've been collecting EPS files and learning InkScape for a while now in anticipation. So once this thing gets here I plan on making all kinds of stuff, much of which has been inspired by other people's creative work that they have shared on this forum.

Has anyone ever used the SC to cut any type of reflective lettering / vinyl? I know in the buying guide it says that it won't cut high intensity or low intensity reflective material but this machine supposedly has 800g of downforce. Is that not enough or is there another factor that I'm overlooking? Surely there is a way to cut reflective letting to go on trailers that doesn't involve buying a Graphtec FC or high end Roland.