Small Vinyl Cutter Reminders

From HackPittsburgh Wiki
Revision as of 17:11, 24 January 2019 by Sowens (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Other Reminders

Vinyl Cutter (Small)

  1. Use the program Sure Cuts A Lot 4 Pro, on the MacBook
    1. Sure Cuts A Lot 4 Pro supports Illustrator, SVG, DXF, PNG, PDF
    2. Note, the mac has a sticker on the lid, "VCarve Computer"
    3. The Vcarve computer has both a windows and mac partition.
    4. Hold down the Alt key while booting to get a menu to select OS, boot into Mac.
  2. Physically insert the vinyl into the vinyl cutter
    1. At this writing we assume:
      1. That the shiny side of the vinyl should be up.
      2. That the vinyl feeds from back to front.
      3. We may be wrong.
    2. Take cutter offline using "On Line" Button
    3. Adjust Rollers
      1. Back of cutter has four black rectangular fittings
      2. Each fitting has a little lever.
      3. Lift lever up (at 90 degrees to fitting) to open the roller
      4. Move material into place
      5. Press lever down to lock the roller
    4. Any unused rollers, lift lever
      1. NOTE: The little red buttons inside on either end are hard stops. Make sure you don't put the vinyl so close to the hard stops that the cutting head will hit the hard stop. There is a small ruler that stops 1/2" from the right-hand hard stop, don't put the vinyl any closer to the hard stop than that.
  1. Use arrow button to move head to zero point.
    1. Zero location should be in lower, right corner of material
    2. Press crosshairs button in center of arrows to reset zero to current location
  2. Press the "On Line" button again to bring the machine online.
    1. Make sure the screen says "on line"
  3. Back to MacBook
    1. Preview button, at top right
    2. Click the "Cutter" button, at top right
      1. Dialog pops up
      2. Usually take the defaults
  4. When cutting is complete, lift roller levers & remove material
  5. "Weed" the vinyl (peel away the material you don't want)
  6. Transfer Tape
    1. The idea is that you stick the vinyl letters or design to the tape, that is the adhesive side of the transfer tape is pressed against the non-adhesive side of the vinyl.
    2. Then you use the tape to peel the vinyl design off the backing, exposing the adhesive side of the vinyl design.
    3. Then press the adhesive side of the vinyl against whatever you want to stick it to.
    4. Buff the transfer tape very hard when applying it.