#Industrial vinyl cutter registration
Some modelers will print the design with a normal printer, align it to the cutting mat with registration marks, and cut the image from the printed paper. Within this domain there are two options for getting a crease pattern and labels on the individual pieces. Simply tack down a piece of cardstock onto this sheet and then load the mat. Just how does the cutter work its magic? These days, many hobbyist vinyl cutters also come with a plastic “sticky” mat that will hold paper down so the cutting tool can lay down its pattern. While mere mortals armed with vanilla inkjet printers will then need to don a pair of scissors to actually cut out the model, a vinyl cutter will cut everything out for us automatically.
Here, Pepakura takes care of generating a vector graphic from you model, and the vinyl cutter actually eliminates one of the biggest pinch-points in this process: labeling and cutting out the paper.
#Industrial vinyl cutter software
With an inexpensive software package called Pepakura, you too can start flattening 3D models into panels that you can print, cut, and reconstitute back into real life from folded paper. Paper Costumesįor the uninitiated, papercraft costumes have become a smashing hit in the last few years. Thankfully, a paint mask vinyl exists exclusively for getting around this issue.
Sticking it down firmly to a surface with our hands kicks off this adhesion process, making it all-too-happy to tear up a recent paint job. Typical vinyl has a pressure-sensitive adhesive. Little did we know, it turns out that vanilla vinyl isn’t actually the best bet for this paint mask application. Let’s be honest: years of vandalism couldn’t make my paint skills this classy! There’s a computer at work here, and the vinyl cutter is the precision instrument to go from digital input to digital output. Here, a few friends and I gloriously anointed our college rocket experiment with a vinyl stencil of our rocket’s name: “Hobbes.” Just after spray-painting, we quickly peeled off the vinyl to let the paint dry undisturbed. Now I can make them at will for all sorts of precision paint jobs. Stencils used to come from the cubbies of my teacher’s art supplies. Here’s a taste from the community at large using them now. Rather than run through this list again though, I thought I’d pick a small handful and give them some real-world context. It’s so common that Make featured a sizeable list of 34 use-cases. “What else would I use it for?” It’s the age-old question holding us back from getting a vinyl cutter up-and running on our desktop. Luckily, the math and CNC control for vinyl cutters were already a solved problem thanks to a lineage of pen-plotting.
Their target audience ranged from everyday signmakers to aircraft giants like Boeing. The actual transition from pen plotting into sign-making is vague, but, at some point, a handful of pen-plotting companies also started adding vinyl cutting to their repertoire. In fact, memory was such a premium back in the day that one of the first published algorithms for CNC control of a pen-plotter goes so far as to hightlight it’s efficiency “with respect to speed of execution and memory utilization.” Rather than punch out a grid of pixels like modern images, which comes with a hefty memory pricetag, plotters traced out vector graphics, which simply took up less memory. (Digital cutting and numerical control and the birth of CNC is an entire article unto itself!) Pen plotters arrived on-scene in the late 50s and early 60s. In fact, vinyl cutters might just be the unsung heroes of research in folding and papercraft.Ī 1985 Roland DXY-1300 Vinyl cutters are one baby step forward in the family tree of pen plotters and digital cutters. Sure, we can start with stickers and perhaps even jumpstart an after-hours Etsy-mart, but there’s a host of other benefits besides just vinyl cutting. Today, I’d like to shed some light on vinyl cutters. I mean, who doesn’t appreciate that mechatronic “buzz” as our printer squirts a 3D CAD model into plastic life? While the 3D printer can take up a corner of my workbench, there’s still plenty of room for other desktop rapid-prototyping gadgets. As far as desktop workbench fab tools go, it’s too easy to let 3D printers keep stealing the spotlight.