Vinyl Cutter and Upholstery vinyl?

Quick Q-

Can the vinyl cutter handle upholstery vinyl as long as the roll fits the cutter itself? Or would the CNC in Woodshop be a better fit?

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Oo. Thatā€™s a good question. We should ask @cvrana or @CaryF300 for their opinion.

Thoughts.

  1. Iā€™m not sure how wide it goes. The rolls look like theyā€™re 12" or 18".
  2. If you can get the width, you should be fine.
  3. Iā€™d go for the vinyl cutter, because itā€™s little knives. The Multicam usually involves spinning. Iā€™m not sure you could secure the vinyl well enough that it wouldnā€™t just be a torn-up rag.
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CNC is definitely not an option. However the vinyl cutter might not work either. Your material has to be pretty rigid otherwise it will just bunch up. You should check if the material is safe to laser, or you might just need to cut it by hand.

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The vinyl cutter is not designed to handle something like upholstery vinyl, but if it is truly ā€œvinylā€ then it is not save for the laser either.

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A drag knife on the shapeoko would work, plenty of downforce. The spindle itself would be kept off.

Is an example build, there are several vendors who sell sleeves that fit around the spindle body and hold a C.O.T.S. cutting blade from a cameo or cricut.

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To my knowledge, a gerber fabric cutter is the only cnc designed to hold down the material properly. Iā€™ve used a cnc router with the spindle off and a marker to draw my template onto the vinyl, then hand cut it. Not optimal but saved time.

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Thank all of you! Iā€™m relating this info to my friend. Sheā€™s looking to join to work on a costume consisting of strips of scales.

Depending on how much cutting you need done, I think I have a working vinyl cutter capable of pretty heavy-duty upholstery vinyl and thin leather. Iā€™ll need to double-check our capabilities before guaranteeing anything though.

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Are the scales different or all the same?

It may be possible to clamp the material between sacrificial sheets of wood or acrylic and CNC cut that.

I think they are all the same? She just joined as a member so Iā€™m going to send her this thread.

I might consider creating a die cutter for something like this. Bend a thick-ish strip of metal into the desired shape, sharpen one edge and weld a backer plate. Apply hammer liberally.

This is where a clicker press would be helpful. Use steel rule to create the desired shape and then put it on a stack of leather/vinyl and cut multiples at one time.

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We do have an arbor press that might be useful, and yeah this would be the way Iā€™d go if I was thinking that Iā€™d want to make this into some sort of production run, but the amount of time and effort to make the press is probably more than the time to just manually hammer out the specific needs for this case.

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@jsnowfreedman

Hi! Iā€™m the person who needs to cut lots of the same shape out of upholstery vinyl. You think you have a machine that might work?

Thanks!

Hereā€™s some details about the project. Itā€™s a suit of scales. We are sewing strips of scales cut from a particular upholstery vinyl to fabric. The original version, each scale was cut by hand with scissors. I took one look and said F*** a bunch of that. The best we have found so far is different sizes of leather belt-end-cutting punch, with the corners touching, and rows opposite each other. See the strips in the photo.

But lining it up is hard, I still need a few thousand scales in total, I just had surgery to fix my carpal tunnel issues, and I personally canā€™t even generate enough force to make the 2-inch punch work. I need a way to not do all this myself, without rabbit-holing too far into a completely new project.

Any help would be appreciated.

Does the top of each strip of scales need to be scalloped, our could it be cut straight across? Iā€™m just thinking about the time it taxes to cut. This might be able to be cut out on the Cricut. It wonā€™t be fast, but faster than cutting by hand.

The scalloping at the top is intended for air flow under the scales. Our prototyping showed us that itā€™s denser, heavier, and doesnā€™t allow any air flow when the tops are solid.

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Iā€™m fairly certain that one of the cutters I have can easily do this - however Iā€™m not 100% sure that itā€™s calibrated properly right now.

Iā€™m going to run and pick up some thick upholstery vinyl and give it a shot to see how well it works. Will give an update later.

(Also one other question, that I couldnā€™t tell from the image and Iā€™m not sure if you mentioned in your post - roughly how big are each of those scales?)

The scales in the image are 1 inch across at the widest point, between the corners. The idea is to graduate the scales to a 2- inch scale on the body itself. Currently working with a 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1.5", and 2" punch. Obviously, if we can do this by computer, we can do more incremental gradations.

Well thatā€™s definitely something that the machine seems to be capable of, although my calibration is a little off which I need to figure out.

When do you need all this done by?