Yeah, I don’t see this replacing my vinyl cutter but, rather, allowing me to cut designs that I couldn’t do practically on the vinyl cutter. I have had to outsource to someone for direct-to-garment for some designs that would have been impossible to weed that I may now (once the GF arrives) be able to do in-house.
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I just found time to finish watching that video. It got a lot of ideas flowing in my head. The alignment notches were great. I loved the raster ablation of the car photo at 14:20 and 29:14. I did an antique truck design kind of like that last summer and really had to simplify the design so I could cut it on the vinyl cutter. It will be great to leave all the detail in.
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I watched the video last night also and picked up a lot of ideas. Happy to know that regular HTV is laserable and that it can be rastered for fine detail. I’ve used notches for centering. My biggest time drain in making shirts is worrying about alignment. I’ve never thought about die cuts for internal parts to minimize weeding. Will start laying out cuts for that with my Silhouette and my Forge when it arrives.
Thanks to @cynd11 for the video referral.
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If it is heat transfer vinyl, it’s probably not laser-safe. Wasn’t it a urethane film in the video?
The stuff in the link says “Best heat transfer vinyl for athletic uniforms.” And then it says “Composition: Polyurethane (PU)”. I wonder if – in that industry at least – “vinyl” has come to mean “that sheet stuff you put in vinyl cutters to make signs and patterns” rather PVC. Which would really suck for people trying to figure out what to cut with a laser, because they’d have to double and triple-check everything and still risk the possibility that some twit shipped them the wrong stuff.
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Can you say “Proofgrade”? That takes the guess work out of things. Otherwise there are ways to test plastics for the primary culprit - chlorine.
I wonder how wide the proofgrade catalog will be (e.g. whether it would include heat-transfer materials). Right now it seems that everything Proofgrade will have to go through GF, which is a sort of bottleneck. If GF gets big enough, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of licensing program where materials suppliers could apply their own barcodes or whatever after certifying and testing.
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As the video mentions, Heat Transfer VINYL is a catch all term. Most HTV is PU (always check the material fact sheet for composition). Stahls’ video indicated that they have an info sheet on their products. Probably the must common HTV manufacturer is Siser. Their only PVC product is Stripflock. I see some PET ones listed, I believe that is laser safe?
https://www.siserna.com/Files/2016-heat-transfer-vinyl-instructions.pdf
It looks like the majority of garment transfer media is laser safe, even though it is called “vinyl”.
That being said, most self adhesive wall or vehicle vinyl is PVC and has to be avoided. There only are a few specialty brands that are not.
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These videos have me all fired up. UPS is to deliver my unit today.
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Congrats on your soon-to-be delivered GF 
!!
Congrats!
I haven’t tried anything with fabric yet. Let me know how it goes!
Just came in about an hour ago and quickly ran off the ruler. I may not have much time during the holidays but wait till the first of the year.
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Did the dye work ?
I forgot about it while moving on to other projects. Will try it tomorrow and report back.