Mangos and Peaches

Welcome back. I figure that if you’re reading this right now and you actually followed part 1 all the way through that you must be one of the following:

1. Extremely bored with nothing better to do (or too lazy to click off the page).
2. Actually interested in seeing how this process develops.

Either way I’m going to jump right back into some explanations.

Phase 3: Cut/Print

Now that I have acceptable vector artwork I go select the vinyl roll that will be cut and load it into the plotter. Only one color will be used for this sign, a black vinyl on top of the white substrate. The roll of vinyl is fed through the back of the plotter carefully:

From the front of the plotter I pull the vinyl forward and make sure the roll is aligned. If it’s off by a fraction of an inch the material can skew off the rollers and make the machine go haywire. I’ve seen this happen before and trust me when I say it’s hilarious, but and unacceptable waste of material and time. So with the vinyl aligned to the pinch rollers (pinch rollers: small wheels that move the vinyl back and forth through the plotter) I clamp down the rollers and let the machine measure the vinyl.

I use my softwares built in production manager to handle all cutting on the plotter. I enter dimensions and coordinates and send the job to cut! I’d like to add that watching these types of machines in action is pretty impressive.

Phase 4: Weeding

After the machine is done cutting I move the piece of vinyl over to the production table for weeding. Weeding is the process where I remove all of the excess vinyl to reveal the that was cut into the vinyl. When you position the vinyl under the glare of a light you can see the cut lines made by the plotter:

With the Xacto Knife I carefully begin to lift off the pieces of vinyl I want to remove, making sure I dont remove any of the logo’s shapes.

I’ve found that a good understanding of Positive Space and Negative Shape helps out during this process. For the more complex designs I print out a guide that shows which parts need to be removed. Here is what the logo looks like after weeding out the unwanted vinyl:

Phase 5: Premasking

So now I have the information and artwork that will be placed on the sign. During this phase I will mask the vinyl using a special paper that has a light coat of adhesive on one side. Think of it as an oversized roll of masking tape because that’s pretty much what it is.

I align the vinyl sheet with the roll of pre-mask and begin to unroll a sheet big enough to cover all of the vinyl graphics:

Since the masking paper is feeding off a roll, it remains elevated above the sheet with vinyl. The masking paper needs to be applied evenly to prevent bubbles and wrinkles so I start from the far end and work my way towards the roll wiping the masking paper onto the vinyl in smooth systematic strokes:

After the masking paper has been applied I cut the sheet used off of the roll and trim the edges of my sign. The straight edges are the exact measurements of the sign, so with a steady hand I cut along these straight edges using an Xacto Knife:

I’ve gotten to the point where I could cut a straight line with little to no effort, but every once in a while I get a crooked area. This excess vinyl is easily removed so I’m don’t pay any attention to it:

Now I’m ready to apply:

Continue to Part 3