Along with the laser cutting, this weeks assignment was to cut something with the vinyl cutter.

So I decided to cut the logo for 6th empire, the logo looks like a pope hat because the head of the alliance likes to roleplay as the space pope.

What made this a tricky cut, was that I needed to use 3 colors, so I needed to make three cuts instead of just one. To get the alignment right it was necessary to use alignment dots. Easiest way to get the dots to always be in the right place, is to have them come along for the ride from the start.

With 2020 hindsight, I think it would have been better to use rectangular dots on the bottom, on both sides. This would have allowed for easier aligning for the layers, also the dots should be bigger, because they need to be more visible through the transfer medium.

To prepare the for the cutting, i had to separate the areas of the logo I wanted to cut. I did this in Gimp, and then in inkscape ran an edge detection to get the proper lines. I wanted to use all three colours we have, so I needed to make 3 files.

This is my initial image, to make the file I needed for cutting the white parts of the logo, in gimp I filled the image with black, and cleared out all the leftovers and parts I did not want to cut.

Then in inkscape I ran a bitmap trace of the image, to get the borders that are where I want the vinyl cutter's blade to travel. Since I chose to run 8 passes, this means I get a grouped element that has 8 versions of the edge. just ungroup them and pull one of them for further processing and delete the rest.

Now by repeating this, we can make the cutting lines for all three layers.

Now we just print them out with the vinyl cutter, if you want multiple copies you just cut and paste the line until you are satisfied. By using transfertape it is then easy to lay the layers over eachother, to get the full completed logo.

To prepare the vinyl cutter for the job, you need to press down the lever in the left, this lifts up the rollers that will move the vinyl along the Y axis of the vinylcutter, while the blade it self will run along the X axis in the front.

You can use either sheets of vinyl or rolls of it, at the lab we have rolls of yellow, black, and white. The ability to use sheets of the vinyl allows one to use pieces that are left behind when accidentally cutting a project in the wrong direction. This way no material gets wasted.

On the keypad you can with the arrows move the blade and the vinyl around to look for the proper place, either to avoid cutting an already done part when doing a bigger project, or using a mishaped piece of vinyl. You just press the Origin button to define the location where the blade is at that moment, as the origin point for the next cut.

The cutter has three cutting programs, Edge, Roll and Piece, of these three the Roll is the one that only needs an origin point, others keep track of the material to find where it ends and begins. You can also vary the force at which the blade cuts the material, some vinyl needs to be cut deeper and others need a more lighter touch. Cuts that go through both the vinyl and the sheet it is attached to can be tricker to use. Once the viyl cutter is ready you just hit print from the program, and it starts cutting.