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.
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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.
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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?
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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:
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Cool, thanks!
eh, mixed results. It’s kind of melty to cut, especially the smaller you go.
there may be a setting that would work just right, but I didn’t find it quickly.
as for engraving, it sort of works. I only went as high as 340 LPI, and there is a fair bit of material left in the areas that should be blank. higher power was starting to blast though the backing (stopped that test, although it might have enough integrity left to still work)
Could work out well for a distressed effect, I won’t have a chance to try pressing it for a little while, rush job came in thats gonna take up the next two days entirely. But I see promise for the engraving technique that would allow much finer detail than I would ever want to spend time weeding by hand.
(shown here on a 1"x1" grid)
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Very interesting, thanks for trying!
Hopefully someone can figure out how to translate the LaserFlex settings to our GFs.
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With some experimenting, I was able to dial in these settings for Siser NA EasyWeed Heat Transfer Vinyl:
Kiss cut 200/1
Cut out 250/20
Everything else default.
I used this material
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very nice. did you have to engrave away all the other material?or did you cut and peel the un-needed off?
No. Just peel. I am amazed how well it worked. Took a while to dial in those settings.
Can you show a zoomed picture on your tightest corners? I’m curious about overburn.
Never mind, I downloaded the fullsize image and got what I needed.
Thanks!
Awesome, thanks!
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Nice job! I kinda thought that slowing it down would be the ticket, but I ran out of time to keep playing around.
looks perfect. Some of the ones that I cut had so much melting at the corners that I wonder if they will set correctly when I try pressing them. Have your tried a line of small text? that’s where I think the laser will really shine over a plotter, if it works.
now that I think more about it, I’m sure the laser never had enough time to get up to full speed on the letters I tried, which means more lingering at the many corners… did you get pin-prick burns through the backer at the right-angle corners?
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I’m totally discouraged. The white and pink cut great. The rest of the colors are not cutting as well. even with adjustments, I am not cutting enough through the HTV to separate, while at the same time cutting too far into the transfer plastic. Maybe I am tired. Giving up for the moment.
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I’ve noticed that even with a blade, colors can cut differently. It’s possible that some just won’t be laserable.
(Other cutters have a “frequency” knob that we don’t have, I wonder what we’re missing out on?)