Using vinyl cutter to make money

Tags: custom vinyls , how to make money cutting vinyl , vinyl banners , vinyl cutter , vinyl signs. I’ve designed print work for a while and am excited to work with vinyl for businesses etc. Vinyl cutting is one of the many arts and crafts businesses that you can quickly pick as a side hustle. Selling downloaded designs without a business license is considered as theft.

Things You Can Make With a Vinyl Cutter

Unlike printing a picture, cutting vinyl to create graphic decals is a bit more involved. Following is the process flow mohey the steps necessary to cut vinyl and apply your decal to your target surface. To create this article, 14 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. Together, they cited 7 references. This article has also been viewed 61, times. Categories: Cutting Tools.

Work-at-Home Mom Starts a Vinyl Decal Business

I bought my first vinyl cutter over ten years ago and have been learning ever since. With a vinyl cutter, you can make products to sell and earn an extra income. You can do the same work most large sign shops do using just a corner of a room, while spending very little money. I set up a small sign shop in a corner of a spare bedroom. I bought a Roland Stika SX vinyl cutter which can hold up to a inch-wide roll of adhesive-backed vinyl film. I connected the vinyl cutter to an old laptop I was no longer using.

What do you need to start making money with a vinyl cutter?

Unlike printing a picture, cutting vinyl to create graphic decals is a bit more involved. Following is the process flow for the steps necessary to cut vinyl and apply your decal to your target surface. To create this article, 14 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. Together, they cited 7 references. This article has also been viewed 61, times. Categories: Cutting Tools.

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Author Info Updated: December 28, Learn more Create your artwork. Simple artwork like text is the easiest artwork to cut with a vinyl cutter. All text on all the Windows or Mac included fonts can be typed directly into a vinyl cutting program.

This includes fonts like Symbol. Alternatively, you can draw shapes and prepare vector art specifically for vinyl cutting with a graphics program like InkScape, Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Usually, when people want to vinyl cut an image, mohey clean vector art is the most time consuming process but yet it is the most important.

Creating clean VCRVA is even more time consuming because adequate thought has to go into figuring out what portions of your design you are going to keep and what portions you are going to remove or ‘weed’ away. If tl take a photograph and bring it into a cutting program like Flexi Starter 10 and automatically convert it into vector art you will likely have a mess to clean up.

Vector art format differs from bitmap or JPEG art format in that vector art contains lines and arcs to define the picture whereas bitmaps and their equivalents are just a pattern of pixels without any edge definition.

Your vinyl cutter can cut lines, arcs and circles but cannot cut a pixel so all artwork must be converted to vector art so your vinyl cutter can cut it properly.

It turns out that Flexi interpreted the yellow as 8 shades of yellow and created edges between the different shades of yellow and separated these edges onto different layers. In the end, a simple black, yellow and blue image ended up being 25 different colors and had edges on 25 different layers. Most of the issues associated with vinyl cutting are related to vector art quality.

Aside from simple fonts already in the Windows or Mac operating system, you can purchase additional fonts, or you can purchase artwork that is Vinyl Cutter Ready Vector Art such as the Mega Vector Art Collection.

Also, if your artwork is complex, consider sending it out to an usinh vendor to have it joney for you. There is also software available such as Vector Magic that can do auto-vectorizing and cleanup for you. Bring your artwork into a vinyl cutter cutting program. Once you have created artwork in a program such as Illustrator, Corel Draw or InkScape, you will need to import it into a vinyl cutter program.

There are several vinyl cutter programs available on the market. The most common is Flexi Starter 10 and numerous private label versions of it followed by programs like SignCut. These programs will lay out your artwork on your vinyl, create weeding lines, create a weeding frame or box, allow you to make copies in rows and columns, scale and rotate, layer the cuts and do several other functions and finally, send the cutting commands to the vinyl cutter.

Connect up your vinyl cutter. Different vinyl cutters will have various methods to connect up to your computer. Many if not most these days connect up through the USB port. Once you have established the connection between your cutter and your computer some drivers may need to be installed you will need to choose the port or the specific cutter in the sign cutting software to establish the connection between your moneyy cutter and the software.

There are systems that are Mac compatible like SignCut but Flexi is not very Maje compatible in its current version. Make sure that your cutter is in the online uding and that the cutter and correct port are selected in the cutting software. This is very important to establish proper communication. Load your material. Basically, vinyl material is roll fed into a vinyl cutter and hangs off the back side of the cutter on rollers or on a roller bar. Feed the vinyl under the pinch rollers and on top of the roller bar and then release the rollers to hold the vinyl in place.

Select and set up setup your blade. The larger the blade angle, the sharper the blade, but the quicker the blade will dull. There are basically two parameters that need to be set to achieve good cutting.

One is blade depth relative to the carriage and the other is pressure set by the cutter. These parameters vary in importance between machine manufacturers. A good way to set blade tip height is to peel off the vinyl and expose the vinyl backing. Place the blade holder in the down position. Some machines have a button control that will allow you to automatically push the carriage to the blade down position while for other carriages you will need to push down on the blade holder manually.

Fasten the blade position so that the tip of the blade is slightly penetrating the top surface of the vinyl backing. From here, you will need to set the pressure. Create a small line of text that you can send to the cutter.

Nake the pressure at a low level and send a cut to the cutter. Chances are that you will not cut fully through the vinyl.

Increase the pressure by an increment of your choosing, move the carriage over and cut this same text. Continue to do this and remember the pressure setting for each cut until you are penetrating the vinyl backing but not going through it. Weed all the text you have cut. The one that weeds the best and leaves a slight impression on the vinyl backing is the optimized setting for this vinyl. This process of setting blade tip depth and pressure may need to be repeated each time you change vinyl type as the release liner thicknesses and vinyl characteristics will change from roll to roll and may require different tip depths or cutting pressures.

Usually, once a cutter is setup for vinyl, you can cut that roll and vinnyl rolls as long as it is all the same type of Vinyl. Cut your artwork. Use the cutting feature of your sign cutting software to send your artwork to the vinyl cutter. Cutting your artwork can take as little as a few seconds to several hours depending on complexity.

Most simple signs and decals take just a few minutes. Remove your cut vinyl. Advance the vinyl roll with the cutter control panel or release the rollers and pull your vinyl forward. Use rolling scissors to trim your vinyl from the base roll. Weed your vinyl. Assuming you did a good job setting up your cutter uaing artwork should weed relatively easily. Weeding is the process of removing material that you don’t want in your graphics. The smaller the features in your graphic, the more challenging weeding can.

Use a weeding pick to carefully pull up and remove the portions of vinyl that you don’t want to transfer to your target surface.

Strategically placed weeding lines are recommended to make this process easier. It is sometimes very difficult to weed all your unwanted material if it is all connected in one piece. This is also sometimes a time consuming and delicate process. Apply transfer tape. With your image weeded, the next step to take will be to transfer your image from the release liner using vinyl cutter to make money the target surface.

TIP: If you are applying your image to the inside of glass make sure to cuttter the mirror image so it appears correct when viewed from the outside of the glass. Transfer tape is similar to masking tape but has a different tack for adhering to your vinyl but releasing it on the target surface. Use a semi-transparent transfer tape to apply your graphics.

Transfer tape comes in many widths up to about 48″. You will want to maoe your squeegee with a felt sleeve to rub the transfer tape on the vinyl to insure good adhesion. Prepare your target surface. Your target usig should be prepared by cleaning with rubbing alcohol or other similar cleaner to remove grease, oil and dirt.

In addition, the surface cutyer be prepared with an application liquid spray that will allow the vinyl to not immediately stick to the target surface.

This will allow you to reposition the graphic on the target surface before allowing it to dry and permanently adhere and remove air bubbles. This saves lots of time and avoids having to redo the job. Apply your graphics. Vinl the transfer tape away from the release liner and your ccutter should come with your transfer tape. If they don’t, push the transfer tape back down and use your squeegee again to stick the transfer tape to the decal.

Take this decal and apply it to the target surface.

Make Money With a Vinyl Cutter

At least that way, you feel like you are starting on the right foot — the money making foot. Companies tell you what vvinyl want to hear but people tell you what happened to. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. I did minimal work, meaning I designed the work, then posted my item and waited for it to sell. But keep in mind, I did this at very minimal using vinyl cutter to make money. Vinyl cutting is one of the many arts and crafts businesses that you can quickly pick as a side hustle. Like any other business, you’ll need some basic equipment and supplies cuttter setting up your vinyl cutting startup. If you are a beginner and want to learn how to make money with vinyl usung, then below are steps on how you can use the machine.