Have a number of heat transfer vinyl cuts coming up and am looking to minimize the amount of waste.
I’ve only done a few cuts with HTV so thought I’d see if those with more experience had thihghts on how close to the margins you can run with the Titan and how closely you space together your objects.
If it matters I’ll be using 20” wide Pro Vinyl.
I don’t have any HTV specific experience, and I’m not sure how it acts differently than regular vinyl (I think it’s more stretchy, right?) So take this with a grain of salt. These are just general cutting tips I’ve learned over the years.
You can make your designs as close as need be. As long as you can cut between them there’s no real limit to how crowded you can make your cut sheet.
The trade off of that is that the less space you have, the more difficult the weeding step can be.
You can also go right up to the edge of your sheet, but the closer you get to the edges the more important it is to run the “area test” to make sure you don’t go off the roll (I’d say leave at least a .25" margin)
Weeding is the most risky part! If you add extra lines between your designs you can save yourself some headaches.
Typically what I do is instead of making extra “power weed” lines in my design, I take an pen knife and cut around each design (just cut the top vinyl layer, not the transfer paper)
Areas to watch out for are letters like E and G where you have little peninsulas. When you’re weeding these they tend to pull up the lettering as well.
Oh, ALWAYS do a test cut to make sure you speed/pressure is right. Nothing is worse than cutting a whole design and realizing that you cut through the transfer paper, or didn’t cut deep enough. Better to waste a few inches on a test than a few feet on a bad cut.
depending on your image, you can create your own weedbox using the offset command in Inkscape or similar tool.