This may not be entirely true. Basically you don’t want to cut PVC, and “vinyl” often is a lazy shorthand for “polyvinyl chloride”… but siser says that’s not always true:
So apparently they make some polyurethane heat transfer film. It might work for you, but I’d be sure you know what you’re getting.
canadian link but, here you go
https://www.engraving-supplies.ca/laser-materials/foil-sticker/laserflex.html
Yes, you can cut heat transfer vinyl that is urethane based on the laser. Trotec and Epilog show how on their websites.
Yep. Siser heat transfer works, which is what you’d want for a t-shirt anyway.
Johnson Plastics has this LazerFlex stuff:
https://www.johnsonplastics.com/laserflex-heat-transfer-sample-kit
I have some and, haven’t tried it yet.
I don’t know of any current HTV (Heat-Transfer Vinyl) that is actually made from vinyl; it’s all PU (polyurethane).
I just spoke with the customer success team over at Siser North America, the makers of Siser HTV. Their logo has the byline “Heat Transfer Vinyl”.
There is no vinyl in their “heat-transfer vinyl”. It can be cut with a laser.
the term seems to come from the fact that the material is roll-based (like sign vinyl), comes on a backing substrate (like sign vinyl) and is generally cut on a plotter (like sign vinyl).
They (and many others offering HTV) do sell sticker/sign vinyl that IS PVC based. Just make sure that what you are buying is PU-based HTV and not sign vinyl. If the seller can’t give you that information, find another seller.
If anyone does develop settings for cutting Siser vinyl, please post. I have a pile of the stuff because I have a vinyl cutter, but have not yet tried it in the laser cutter.
I don’t know what kind of plotter you have, but I can’t imagine the laser being anywhere near as fast for most designs, especially if you were using the no-weeding/ablate all voids method.
Maybe for larger amounts of text, like scripture. (weeding multiple copies of long bible verses in gothic fonts is painful)
I don’t know about speed, but I’ve got a Silhouette and it does not handle tiny bits well. They clog up the blade. That’s one benefit to the laser.
This is at least a starting point:
https://www.epiloglaser.com/resources/sample-club/applique-cutting-laser.htm
It’s for a 50-watt laser, so obviously one should adjust accordingly.
As far as I know the Siser HTV can’t be ablated away for a no-weed final product. (LaserFlex is supposed to allow that but someone on this forum tried it with the GF and could not get it to work, which was a huge disappointment!)
So, kiss-cutting Siser HTV on the GF would just be like cutting with the plotter, and not a time savings… but it would let me use odd-sized scraps more easily. It would also be nice to use the laser on stuff like glitter HTV, which wears out the blades quickly.
that’s a good point. I have plenty of easyweed, I’ll try some tests.
Cool, I look forward to the results!
Can’t you kiss cut the outside of your letters, but straight up cut your voids? You;d jsut need to color-coordinate the shapes in question (voids one color, outer edges of letters another), which may or may not be prohibitively difficult. When you take the sheet out of the GF, all the little cutouts from letters would be left on the crumb tray. You’d then be able to “weed” by simply pulling up the uncut vinyl “stencil” as it were, the negative space. Some transfer paper, and you’re done?
There’s no reason this wouldn’t work on a vinyl cutter as well, in theory.
Yes, but you would need to prepare the file so only the right voids were cut.
For example. the green void is safe to drop free, the pink void isn’t, because it drops the inner part of the art.
Of course. The majority of text doesn’t have double nested islands though, yes? Maybe with some weird fonts, but for the traditional Roman alphabet this will cover you in most cases?
Yeah, for just text that probably works. Though, you still need to edit the file so that only the inner cutlines cut at drop-free power. So, if you are making a lot of a single design that is only text, this could help.
An open issue is still developing kiss-cut settings for the parts you don’t want to drop but i assume that is possible.
This seemed like it shouldn’t be impossible to do in a batch manner, so I investigated. Here you go:
Cool, thanks!
eh, mixed results. It’s kind of melty to cut, especially the smaller you go.
