DIY FRIDAY (..er Saturday): Let’s Make Vinyl Cutters!
Stop sharpening your old Xacto blades and put away your Amberlith, it’s time to equip your studio with a vinyl cutter. The vinyl cutter has been an established art making tool since Ryan McGinness popularized the medium in his work in the early 2000s, and it’s been pillar of the sign making industry for even longer. The vinyl cutter is an off-spring of the plotter-type printer, in which a pen is pulled across the surface of the paper as it’s fed through the machine. These type of printers are often used only for CAD printing these days. In the vinyl cutter the pen is replaced with a knife and the paper with any number of substrates, including, vinyl (with or without adhesive backing), plastic, foam rubber, tape, etc. In this way the vinyl cutter can be used to cut direct stencils, masks, decals and stickers. yes, stickers! And that list is only complete if you don’t violate the manufacturers recommendations and start feeding a roll of Kitakata through in some crazy chin-colle’ experiment.
And thanks to recent innovations in vector graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator one can easily convert hand drawn imagery, or any raster based image for that matter, into vector line art, a format used by all vinyl cutting software.
Think of the possibilities!
Think of the Stickers!
Below are some links to get you started. While you can build it from scratch it seems best if you have access to an old pen plotter (check craigslist or ebay).
How to for the hardware:
http://www.cuttingedgecnc.com/vinyl.htm
http://www.hackaday.com/2006/04/26/old-pen-plotter-converted-to-vinyl-cutter/
http://www.luberth.com/help/pen_plotter_vinyl_cutter_swivel_knive_drag.html
And while you are at it a degree in engineering probably wouldn’t hurt.
When you finally run out of energy I would recommend taking a look at the Summacut-R D60 made by the Belgium company Summa. It’s a real beauty, with a 24″ roll feed, advanced tracking and ‘the world’s most advanced optical sensor’; it cuts vinyl, reflective and fluorescent films, sandblast resist and other thick films, has a pen for plotting on paper and a pounce tool (pouncing?!!). Unlike many brands Summa is known for having very stable, user-friendly software that runs on the Mac OS. Oh yeah, the Summacut-R D60 costs a painful $2k. They do show-up for sale used on sign industry forums and if you frequent them with the regularity of an ebay junkie you just might find one.
World’s Most-Fanciest Xacto Knife.
Click image for lustful close-up.
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We’ve had some interest in these types of promotional items and had some graphics done by another vendor. Is it possible to use the same artwork? The graphics company is Concord Signs & Banners 3568 Kimball Way Concord, CA 94518 – 925-808-3817. I’m not positive if the art files will be in a format that you can work with.