missy here: lots of questions about vinyl cutters.. HELP!!
i am just looking into purchasing a vinyl cutter for my up and coming business... can anyone recommend a good and reliable cutter?
i have found a few that i am interested in the 15" Stika and the GT60 Jr 24".
also, does anyone know if these are pinchroller or adjustable?
how do you work them?
i have lots more questions so if anyone can help that would be great!!
thanks,
missy
OK, my start-up costs were only $1,500.00!
Brand new, 32" Master vinly cutter, Signgo Pro software, tools, clip-art, and vinyl. Plus 2 tutorial dvd's were thrown in for only $1,500.00! Yeah, they say the cheap cutters are loud, and will wreck about every 20 jobs or so, plus they need a serial port (Hard to come by these days!), but the return on investment is great! I wish I'd gotten the goldensign 950C instead of the master in hindsight, it's only $100.00 bucks more and has lots of buttons and handy things like a quick change blade holder and a knob on the end to open and close the pinch rollers. But it's hard to beat a start-up cost like that, everything I needed but the computer and exacto knife. The tutorials weren't the best, but duluth sign supply does admit that, and says they're just to give you an idea. If it was great, they couldn't afford to include it in such a cheap package.
About the wrecking of jobs when the cutter goes mad, it seems to mostly be with people who are using usb to serial adaptors, although it happens to me every other week or so. But even the most expensive vinyl job wrecked only costs me a few bucks, so I'll gladly live with it since the $3,000.00 or so I saved in the start-up costs is worth it. These cheap machines are much slower, but they still cut faster than I can weed out the images, so it's not an issue unless I got big enough to hire somone else. Mind you, if I did, I'd still just buy a second cheap cutter, and use the couple of thousand not spent on a fancy cutter to get an outdoor printer. I got frustrated enough with the usb adapter that I bought an old used computer with a serial port just for cutting and had much less trouble ever since.
I just got this cutter so I could make glass etching stencils between massage sessions and make a few basic signs for my business, so wasn't willing to spend big bucks on a high production machine. It turned out that when people found out I had a cutter, everybody wanted something cut, and in 10 months, I haven't made a glass stencil yet!
PS, try www.inkscape.org for a neat vectorization program. Inkscape graphic design lets you manually tweak values for vectorization, which is nice if you have complicated things like photographs to vectorize and the automatic vectorization in fancy programs doesn't give you what you wanted. Plus it's free!
There's also royalty free graphics at www.openclipart.org . Drawn something you'd like to share with the world? Post an image to them. I thought it was fair to send them one original drawing of mine when I downloaded 8,000 from them. No obligation, just thought it was fair.
Oh, yeah, more free practicing software.
Try www.SignGo.com and download their 30 day free trial. It's the full Pro version, so you can practice design and get a good idea how to do so before you ever buy a cutter. Go ahead and email me at [email protected] if you have any questions.