Kuva Vasemmalla - Zoom

Along with the laser cutting, this weeks assignment was to cut something with the vinyl cutter.

So I decided to cut the logo for 6th empire, the logo looks like a pope hat because the head of the alliance likes to roleplay as the space pope.

What made this a tricky cut, was that I needed to use 3 colors, so I needed to make three cuts instead of just one. To get the alignment right it was necessary to use alignment dots. Easiest way to get the dots to always be in the right place, is to have them come along for the ride from the start.

With 2020 hindsight, I think it would have been better to use rectangular dots on the bottom, on both sides. This would have allowed for easier aligning for the layers, also the dots should be bigger, because they need to be more visible through the transfer medium.

When I was working on the vinyl cutter I did run into a problem, it initially wanted to make the cuts along the width of the material. But after a while I noticed, that the cutter for some reason defaults to the length, and one needs to separately tell it to print along the width. This is simply done by turning off the rotation in printer preferences before cutting.


To prepare the for the cutting, i had to separate the areas of the logo I wanted to cut. I did this in Gimp, and then in inkscape ran an edge detection to get the proper lines. I wanted to use all three colours we have, so I needed to make 3 files.

This is my initial image, to make the file I needed for cutting the white parts of the logo, in gimp I filled the image with black, and cleared out all the leftovers and parts I did not want to cut.

Kuva Oikealla - Zoom

Then in inkscape I ran a bitmap trace of the image, to get the borders that are where I want the vinyl cutter's blade to travel. Since I chose to run 8 passes, this means I get a grouped element that has 8 versions of the edge. just ungroup them and pull one of them for further processing and delete the rest.

Now we have a single set of lines to work with, we need to remove the fill

And then make the line solid

Now by repeating this, we can make the cutting lines for all three layers.

Now we just print them out with the vinyl cutter, if you want multiple copies you just cut and paste the line until you are satisfied. By using transfertape it is then easy to lay the layers over eachother, to get the full completed logo.

Kuva Vasemmalla - Zoom

The paperwork

Sub-pages

  • FREEHTML5.co Free HTML5 Template
    The 6th Empire

    One of the Alliances I am involved with in EVE online. Since their logo has the colors the lab has available, I use it for the vinyl cutting assignment.