Razpewton

repodon, Fayetteville is a HUGE racing community. You have Fayetteville Motor Speedway and Fayetteville Motorsports Park, with dirt, asphalt and drag racing all right there. Drivers and crews REALLY like their beer, so naturally really like beer mugs. Many I've given away are not even used, they're placed on a shelf for display with their trophies. These guys are big on this. I have many friends in the racing community and I enjoy doing things for them and being a part of it all. I've never sold any of the mugs I've created, but I've had offers of $20 or so. I suppose if I did sell them, I'd ask $12 per....maybe $15. At $1 a mug, plus the small costs of the vinyl, that's around a 1000% profit. You would probably fare well if you paid for a pit pass (usually around $25 to $35) and wandered around, telling drivers how bad-ass their cars look and handing out your business cards, featuring your Customized Beer Mugs. At a 1000% profit, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't pay for your set up with the business generated from ONE visit. Additionally, most tracks have 50/50 girls running around selling tickets of chance. If you donated a few of the mugs shown below as additional handouts to be given out as additional draws AFTER the 50/50 drawing, you'd not only gain track management favor for supplying additional, crowd-pleasing hand-outs, but you'd also reap free advertisement as the announcer could broadcast who these nice, high-quality racing beer mugs were donated by ___________. You could even blast the track's name on the mug and really impress them. I dunno....you make a sign, put it out up, and you have HUNDREDS of people reading it. With beer mugs, each person wants THEIR OWN. Just a thought. Anyways....good luck with your endeavors.

I use between 75 and 110 psi. Additionally, I hold the nozzle about 10" to 12" away from the item I'm blasting. If you are too close, it can penetrate the vinyl. For the most part, I use regular vinyl and it works great. I have used the vinyl specifically designed for blasting, but didn't notice an difference. Before I acquired a cutter, I had friend who would cut masks out of whatever was available, including scraps.. As long as you flatten any bubbles, you're okay.

The crystal items came from a site I found: http://www.crystalbydesign.com/ Every now and then, you can get REALLY GOOD deals on some of their "close out" items. The trophies pictured there sell in the local mall for $80 blank. I got thme there for $2 apiece (I bought every one they had). This was a couple years ago, but you can still get really good deals there. I till have a ton of the paperwieghts, which I acquired for $1 each. I just checked.....they have SEVERAL items in their closeout section for $2 and up....

I've been sandblasting items for the past few years, which is what brought me to this forum and ultimately purchasing a vinyl cutter from one of your members. I used to have a friend cut me the masks (stencils) until he moved away. I've been giving them away as gifts at car meets, race tracks and other events. But people will pay $12 for a beer mug easy and I've had literally hundreds of people asking me to blast them quantities of mugs, shot glasses or paperweights, but I simply don't have the time to accommodate them. I stay pretty busy. I use a Cyclone blasting cabinet (cheapest they have) and can fit 5 to 6 mugs in at a time. Here's a link to one pictured. http://www.equipmentland.com/products/cyclone/index.shtml They're not very expensive. You'll also need an air compressor which you can get for different prices. A used one would be perfect. I use brown aluminum oxide at between 75 and 100 psi. I purchased a 50 lb bag several years ago and still have a quarter of a bag left and have done a LOT of blasting. The car clubs go NUTS over these, especially if you sold a shot-glass~beermug combination (boiler maker). Race car drivers also love sets of these for themselves and pit crews.... I'm sure if you used your imaginations, you could thinks of gazillions of groups that would go bonkers for their own personalized, sand-blasted mugs. Bowling teams, softball, child care centers (wait...scratch that), FRATERNITIES, and even local pubs with their own bar logo on it. They make GREAT GIFTS, Trophies and even....um......bribes [ahem]. I get my beer mugs at Dollar Tree for $1 each. These are REALLY NICE beer mugs! Heavy and relatively flawless. Below are some of the results.... Hope this helps.

I'm looking for some racing graphics, specifically checkered flags in .eps format. If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd be eternally grateful. Thanks...

It's good to see we have so many racing enthusiasts on here (especially dirt!). I've been going to tracks for the past 5 years or so...and have taken a lot of pictures (over 60,000). I have tons of Late Models, Sprints (Minis and 360's), streets stocks, pure stocks, box stocks, open wheeled modifeds, eMODs, sportmans and even some antiques racers. I have a collection of weeds and silhouettes. If I can help in any way, let me know.... Late Models running this weekend! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee HAW!!! http://www.northfloridaspeedway.com/temp/17d.jpg[/img]

You're absolutely right. I had done a search, but was not on the home page, so came up empty. From the home page, many returns are available. Thanks for the info... ...and thanks Kenya!

You can even request all returns be of clipart. http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&um=1&q=bigfoot+footprint&sa=N&start=42&ndsp=21#start=0&imgtype=clipart

Thanks for the manual. Awesome contribution to the community. ;D

Oh yeah...introductions. I recently purchased an MH-721 and will have a million questions, possibly more. I'm from Middleburg, Florida and my interests are being creative with just about any medium you can imagine. Carpentry, graphics, websites, sand blasting, writing, photography and more. I enjoy going to the race track (dirt racing) and usually take 500 to 1000 pictures when I go. This is because I'm not very good at it and it takes me that many shots to get a couple decent pictures. I've wanted a vinyl cutter to make masks (stencils) for sand blasting. I'm just beggining to set up the cutter and have donwloaded the 7 hour Tutorial which came with the cd. I've read through much of this forum and know there is a lot of knowledge and experience right here. This isn't a business for me, it's a hobby, but it looks like it's gonna be a most enjoyable one. I'llorbably have more question about the SignBlazer Elements software than the cutter. It a pleasure meeting everyone.

When you import into SB, do you import as a file or a folder? I spent a little time on the program last night (just learning) and it seemed that it will import folder, but I was unable to view any files (individual images).

Welcome from another newb. What track do you take pictures at, Mike? I'm the webmaster and photographer for North Florida Speedway. I'm no pro, but I sure have fun!!

Thank you very kindly and it was great meeting you as well. Thanks for taking the time to give me some training on the unit before I loaded it up and headed home. Anything I can ever do for you, just let me know. I haven't cut my first pattern yet...maybe tonight!