I have an unusual request. I have been wanting to join Makerspace for a while and this may be my catalyst. I am getting married soon and have designed paper picado cutout card invites for our wedding. Our vendor let us down and now I am in desperate need of a laser cutter. I need to send out by April 15th so either need to learn to use the machine quickly or pay a member to do this for me, which I’d be glad to do, although using this as my reason to join the community would be extra special. Any help or guidance GREATLY appreciated!
How big is the design you need? The new smaller laser we are getting setup should be able to do what you need, we are almost done getting it setup.
Did these cards get taken care of?
-the purring dork
I would be interested in making these for you. For a good price.
I never got a response from him, I was just going to show him how to use the laser and help him get the right settings for the paper. As long as he pays for laser time the rest would be up to him.
I just joined last night and “laser cut wedding” invites is how I sold my future wife on me joining. I have a design but need help on file setup (color code cuts?) and best practices. I need to expedite these as well since my wedding is 2 months away and no invites yet.
I would greatly appreciate if I can get these files ready to cut and have some one that is approved to execute the cutting.
Thanks Roland
P.S. I’m here right now and will probably be here all day.
FWIW, I just cut a bunch of scrapbook paper and scrapbook cardstock on the Zing. I used 100% speed, 10 - 15% power, and about 500Hz freq. This would be a starting point for your experimentation.
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Thank you very much!
I recommend using the Zing. It’s a nice clean low-power laser and I have had good success with it cutting paper. I used the old FSL to laser-cut some elaborate Christmas cards and I find the Zing much nicer for this application.
A few suggestions about designing and cutting your invitations.
- Draw everything as a vector format.
- Those vectors need to be stroked with a stroke 0.001" wide in order to be cut. Use only “major” digital colors (i.e., red, green and blue each set to 00 or FF). (red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, magenta)
- You want to order your cuts from the center outward. For precision of the inner cuts, the outside perimeter (if there is one) should be the last thing that is cut. This can be accomplished by assigning different colors to different vectors. In theory the Zing can optimize the cutting from the center outward, but I usually don’t leave it to chance. Usually this can be accomplished with a two color “image” - one color for inner cuts and one color for outer cuts. Add a third color if you want to “engrave” lines for scoring/folding your invitation.
- It doesn’t matter which color you assign to which cut as long as you can keep track of it. You will specify the cutting order, etc. at the time you print to the laser and it could be changed every time you run the job if you wanted to. It might help you to make your own personal convention now and stick to it in the future. For instance I always cut mine in the order of Red, then Green, then Blue because that’s easy for me to remember and I find that yellow and cyan are hard for me to see. But that’s your own personal choice and any order will work.
- Save the file as an adobe pdf file. Note that this isn’t exactly the same as an adobe document file like a tech manual … it has to be saved from a drawing program that has the ability to save a vectorized pdf file. Adobe Illustrator is a good way to get a suitable/compatible file. I seem to recall that we were also able to save to pdf from Inkscape.
- Make a small test image (like one square inch) with a small piece of your actual text or shapes in it. Use this (repeatedly) to tweak your settings instead of destroying an entire invitation for each test.
- I would strongly suggest cutting only one layer of invitations at a time. Gang cutting risks setting the whole pile on fire. (Guess how I know this … )
- @nick suggests cutting this on top of a silicone baking sheet to minimize backside scorching, but I find that unnecessary with the Zing if you use the lowest power required to cut through it.
A few design considerations:
- Keep in mind that this is similar to cutting a stencil. If you were to cut a traditional letter “O”, for instance, the center of the O will also fall away unless it is attached similarly to a stencil.
- Just like cutting with a saw, the laser has kerf where it burns away the paper. This will limit the complexity of what you can cut, particularly text. I believe the kerf is about 0.006" to 0.008" for this application. I just cut some text; font Tonite, 26 point, manually modified to be stencil-like and retain centers of letters. This was about as small as I could go unless I was willing to sacrifice letter centers. The retaining pieces (like where the “a” and “o” are connected) were perilously thin, but I was gluing to a substrate. Of course this is highly dependent on the font you choose - with a block type font you could probably go smaller.
- AND - speaking of text - letters are not single-line fonts. They are outlined shapes.
- If you are cutting out small shapes that you want to save (like maybe you are going to glue hearts or guns or something back onto the invitation ) - the Zing sucks small parts up into its exhaust system. Irretrievably. Any paper parts smaller than about 1" x 1.5" need to be attached to the main sheet with a small tab 1/32" or less and removed later with an Xacto knife (i.e., don’t complete your vector perimeter). It helps a bit to position this in the corner furthest from the exhaust but the tabs are still needed.
- If you are making a folded invitation, you can lightly score the folding places using less power than a full cut. (this would require another color in your vector file).
- Aligning the blank invitation. If you are cutting the external perimeter, either in entirety or partially (like scallops, for instance) you will want to align the paper precisely with the bed of the laser. The most precise way is to include this border as part of the design file and cut an alignment “jig” from something sturdy like matte board.
a. After your tweaking is done, put matte board into the Zing.
b. Tape its perimeter to the bed.
c. Refocus the laser for the matte board.
d, Cut out JUST the perimeter of the invitation (remembering that matte board will require more power than the invitation).
e. Very carefully remove that insert, being careful not to move the matte board.
f. Refocus the laser for the invitation paper.
g. Place each of your subsequent invitations into that and they will be precisely aligned.
People will tell you that you can eyeball the alignment, and you can, but if precision matters this is the best way.
I’m sure this is more than you want to know. Don’t be intimidated. Everything in here is actually easy.
Chris
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Chris, Thank you for the in-depth instructions. Attached is my cut design. I will be pre-printing all the text on 8.5"x11" cardstock. I would like to stack the job to cut multiple pages at once but have been informed that it is not a good idea because of scorching and gas being trapped between the sheets.
