Ale Rivadeneyra - Computer controlled cutting

Fourth assignment

Part II

Date

6 February 2019

Vinyl cutter

The machine for this assignment is a Roland SV - 15. It has a maximum cutting area of 340 x 1000 mm. The acceptable material to use is PVC or label material of a maximum of 0.1 mm and including the backing 0.3 mm.

Making some cuts

For this part I started opening the vinylcutter software and playing with it, as you can see, it lets you draw some basic forms and make some letters, or entire texts of course.

I really didn't know what I wanted to cut and if a wanted something more elaborated I needed to import the file (made in vectors) from somewhere.

I was exploring my computer looking for some file that was interesting to cut, but what I found that really caught my atention was some op art images.

As this kind of art is made by many, many lines the precision of the machine and the complexity of things it is able to do aroused my curiosity.

Here is what I did

I opened the image and with a righ click I chose the "perfilar imagen" (profiling image) option.

It opens a new window where you can control the features

The image with the blue lines is the information the machine is going to use to cut the vinyl. I actually did it twice because the first time, it wasn't showing all the lines.

Every vinylcutter has a different way of securing the material. In this case I just had to pull the two hooks, at each side, down.

Process is really fast once I had it in my hands I just took off the excedent material (the negative). It was very tricky, the vinyl started attaching to and pulling away some parts that I needed for the image to be complete. I fought against it and finnaly won

I thinkg the result was kind of cool but it did not have the effect I was looking for.

Thus, I decided to try a new one.

The process was pretty much the same, except that in the cleaning part I decided to go step by step, almost line by line and still some parts moved. I think it was because the touching and sticking surface was ver thin.

It turned out well at the end. You can appreciate the op art, I really liked it but i haven't decided where to put it yet, I don't want the effect to get lost.