Silhouette SD

[Dave Schneider]

I am in the process of producing a bunch of windows for my White Pearl macaroni building. I would like to utilize colored vinyl, stuck onto clear styrene, and then trimmed out using the Silhouette cutter. I have done this successfully a couple of times for my Milbrew building and scale house, however I have trouble getting the vinyl stuck to the styrene without a bunch of ripples and air bubbles. Those were small projects compared to this one, and I don't want to waste the vinyl I have. At one point Chris333 suggested spraying the styrene with soapy water and then using a squeegee. Any tips of tricks from people that have done this?

Best wishes, Dave

[DKS]

I am in the process of producing a bunch of windows for my White Pearl macaroni building. I would like to utilize colored vinyl, stuck onto clear styrene, and then trimmed out using the Silhouette cutter. I have done this successfully a couple of times for my Milbrew building and scale house, however I have trouble getting the vinyl stuck to the styrene without a bunch of ripples and air bubbles. Those were small projects compared to this one, and I don't want to waste the vinyl I have. At one point Chris333 suggested spraying the styrene with soapy water and then using a squeegee. Any tips of tricks from people that have done this?

Best wishes, Dave

Yes, I've done the water trick to apply vinyl cleanly to smooth surfaces. Works well. Just mist on a little; it doesn't need to be dripping. And use just a few drops of detergent, which acts as a wetting agent.

[Dave Schneider]

Thanks David! I will give that a try.

Best wishes, Dave

Edit: It worked great! I was able to apply vinyl to a 6x12 inch piece of styrene without any air bubbles or wrinkles. Thank again David and Chris.

[Sokramiketes]

I'm pretty lazy so I use Windex for the wetting agent since there's no mixing involve. 

[Dave Schneider]

Thanks for the suggestion Mike. The soap and water worked pretty well and wasn't that much extra work compared to picking the vinyl chads off of 74-12 pane windows with a sharpened tooth pick! That's 888 window panes for those scoring along at home. It wasn't too bad, just took a couple of hours. The result is near scale sized window muntins. Here is a mediocre phone photo showing the results.



Best wishes, Dave

[pnolan48]

888 window panes--that's dedication to a building! It looks great!. I've been popping windows out of 0.10 styrene with the rounded end of a small paintbrush. I use about four cutting passes, then place the styrene on a piece of foamboard and press gently, using almost a burnishing motion. It's great for portholes, but also works for square windows. I think it would not work for window panes and the thinnest of your muntins. Great work!

[haasmarc]

Man, I need to get mine out of the box and try it.

[DKS]

Man, I need to get mine out of the box and try it.

It took several months before I finally got around to plugging mine in, but I was really glad once I did. It's a great little machine.

[pnolan48]

Anyone have the problem of the software quitting halfway through a job? I'm cutting some intricate N-scale stuff, like three 173' ship decks with 10" (scale) planking. Sometimes the SD just stops halfway or two-thirds of the way through, and I can't find any way to restart it. It's not costing me much money, as a 9" x 24" sheet of styrene costs me less than $.50, but it does cost me time.

It seems to quit only on the bigger jobs. Actually they are not intricate or complicated, it's mostly straight cuts along the length for the planks. I've ordered the cutting so it cuts the outlines first, then starts on the planking.

Any ideas? Anyone know how to restart the job when it "pauses?"

[Dave Schneider]

Pete,

Sorry, but I have never had this happen. Have you tried contacting technical support? Just tell them you are doing a really complicated scrap book project!

Best wishes, Dave

[pnolan48]

That's a priceless response! My problem is that it's totally unpredictable: usually, if I repeat the job, it goes through flawlessly. It's a free plug-in, so I guess some bugs are to be expected. It probably does not happen with their native software, but I'm now heavily invested in Illustrator. I'm also on CS2 (about 2005), which had a printer flaw that was never solved--it printed only half a document. So I suspect that flaw and this flaw are related. My work-around for the printer was to convert to PDF for printing, but that won't work for the vector-based cutter.

The cutter works well for most jobs. I like Illustrator because many features such as offset paths are perfect for getting everything to work with styrene sheets. I can draw a section and then reduce it by the thickness of the sides, usually .020" or .508 mm. I dislike Illustrator because I cannot take the keel and the sections and then determine the curves for the sides. From experience, I know about what the sides should look like, and usually get within a few mms. which is easy to trim.

[Dave Schneider]

Pete,

I tried the AI plug in when I first got the machine, and couldn't get it to work. I was impatient so I just went with their design software since my stuff is pretty simple. Haven't tried to fix the AI problem and probably won't try anytime soon. You might ask their support folks though....they might be interested in the other applications for their machines.

Best wishes, Dave

[pnolan48]

Their support folk were very nice, but didn't have a clue about what I talking about. In the end, it is an Illustrator problem. And CS2 is now beyond Adobe's upgrade path: I have to buy the whole package for about $950, not the upgrade. I'm going open source. And probably for the next level cutter.

[Guilford Guy]

Has anyone tried cutting peel and stick shingles on the cutter yet? I imagine if you were to cut out a shingle pattern (which would probably be fairly simple to draw+copy+pasta) on sticker paper, then hit it with primer/paint/dullcote you could have a huge supply of these at a relatively cheap price. I'm still saving up for one of my own to play with... that'll be a glorious day.

[Zox]

A bit of a tip for intricate shapes--especially interior cutouts--if you're using CorelDraw.

While I was working on these:





...I was having trouble with some shapes cutting through on one side but not the other. A good example is the oval interior cutouts, such as with "b" and "o"--they would cut through on the left-hand side of the oval, but not the right-hand side, even with multiple passes. With long straight cuts, the effect was less pronounced.

(For reference, the letters are a bit less than half an inch tall, from top of ascenders to bottom of descenders; the grid connecting the letters together in the top photo are N-scale inches wide, or 0.019".)

I was able to correct this by making a copy of the letters (which I'd converted to paths), selecting the letters with the Shape tool, right-clicking, and selecting "Reverse Subpaths." I then dropped the (apparently unchanged) copy back on top of the original.

By doing this, for each pass of the cutter, the shape gets cut twice, but in opposite directions. The difference was significant--I got perfectly clean cutouts with 2 "mirror-mirror" passes (actually 2 one direction and 2 the other), where 4 ordinary single passes left lots of "hanging chads" on the interior pieces.

Just throwing it out there, for anyone who has had similar issues...