You see it everywhere. Vinyl lettering appears on T-shirts, car bumpers, decals, store windows and numerous other items. Have you ever thought of what they use to produce the vinyl letters or graphics. Or maybe you want to start doing that yourself. What you will need is a vinyl cutter, its multiple accessories and a computer.
What Is It?
A vinyl cutter is an add on (peripheral) to your computer. Using computer software you create what you want cut out of vinyl. Using a cutting blade and the cutter controls to determine the depth of the cutting and the speed, your design is cut from the vinyl. You can think of your vinyl cutter as a printer, but instead of using ink to show your creation, it cuts it out of the vinyl for your use.
How Does It Work?
Using a graphic art software program on your computer you format your design and/or words that you want produced in vinyl. Sign cutting software is the most efficient way to do this. Other software images will need to be converted from BMP or JPEG into a vertex-based image. Like sending an image to a printer, your design is sent to the cutter. The vinyl cutter program determines the action of the rollers and blades to exactly reproduce your image with all its curves and lines.
After the cutter is finished you must "weed" the design. That is, you carefully remove all the vinyl that is not part of your finished image. Areas around the outside of your design or the inside of closed letters (Os, Bs) need to be removed by you.
At this point your image is ready to be heat transferred to its final destination, its use limited only by your imagination.
Kinds of Cutters
There are three kinds of vinyl cutters on the market today: flatbed, roll-fed or laser.
As its name implies the flatbed cutter has a flat bed where your vinyl film is laid and remains stationary while the blade moves around to cut the design.
The roll-fed cutter also has a self-descriptive name. The vinyl film is fed from a roll and rollers move the vinyl film along as the blade moves back and forth to do the cutting.
The laser cutter most resembles the flatbed cutter, but lasers rather than blades cut the design/lettering into the vinyl.
Disadvantage
While a vinyl cutter and its creative software can reproduce anything you can imagine there is one major disadvantage to keep us all from going out and getting our own: the cost. The initial cost of a reliable cutter can run into the thousands of dollars and that is before the accessories needed to get the results you want. All of this adds up to a sum that discourages a one time only project.
Supplies and Accessories
Assuming you already have a computer you will need the graphics software program ($150 to $200) to create a design, the vinyl (often in several colors) ($80 to $1,000), transfer tape ($6 to $150), cutter blades ($25 and up), and miscellaneous other accessories: squeegee ($20), vinyl tweezers ($15), easy tack adhesive for placement ($10 to $30), racks to hold vinyl rolls to prevent damage to the vinyl surface ($80). Note: all prices are approximate.
