6. Vinyl Cutter¶
Design and Fabrication¶
Vinyl cutter is a machine created to cut thin materials like paper. A PC should be connected to a vinyl cutter machine to cut a certain shape. First, the program that links the machine and the PC was downloaded. The program is called cricut and the program ask us to choose the type of the machine. The desired design was done using power point since it was just a written design. Then some screen shots of that design were made and uploaded to the program. A complex image type was chosen to ensure the best possible accuracy.
The undesired spaces were then eliminated in the next step.
The desired material was attached to a checkered sticky board. The size and location of the design was adjusted using the program. Since my design was created to be stuck to a t-shirt the design was flipped using the program.
The base material was set to vinyl and a double arrow icon was pressed to load the material. Once everything was ready, it’s the time to click go button. The machine started cutting the desired design and, in few minutes, it was done.
The same procedure was repeated with all words of the design. A helmet drawing was taken from the internet.
Finally, the design was organized on the t-shirt and then stuck using an iron. The golden font stuck well and fast while the white font took longer time and more effort. This may refer to the fact that the quality of paper differs from a distributor/company to other.
The instrument used can be seen in the following Picture
