Vinyl Cutter

For my vinyl cutting assignment, I wanted to do a large vinyl sticker. The first place my mind went was to a street sign. I bought a bunch of blank street signs a few years ago, waiting for an excuse to use them.

The sign I chose was an 18" by 18 " yellow sign that has curved edges. I did not originally know what the curve of the road sign was, and my best idea was to laser cut boxes with a filleted edge of various radii, until I found one that was the same profile as my road sign corners (pictured below). I found that the radius of the corners are very close to 40mm

Once I had all of the dimensions of the sign, I then designed my sign in photoshop.

The actual vinyl cutting went very smoothly the default force was sufficient, and while the print did stop midway through I was just able to make a new file and delete the geometry that has already been cut which worked like a charm

After the vinyl was finsihed cutting I used transfer tape to transfer my design over to the sign since it had so many separate parts. However, being the noob to vinyl cutting and transfer tape I did not do a great job of applying it and I left some big air bubbles (pictured below) that eventually got squished into creases

As well as the transfer tap was very strong and I was not able to hold down the vinyl and peel off the transfer tape at the same time So the solution I came with was to clamp the vinyl to a table such that I could use both hands to peel of the transfer tape. The clamp really helped alot because alot of times the transfer tape would not pick up the vinyl correctly and I would have to fix it with the weeding tool and to basically get a whole hand back made that experience alot less painful

Finally I placed the transfer on my road sign and peeled it off, I was left with my final HTMAA inspired road sign. However, the final product is not perfect the letters shifted around a good about, because of the air bubbles and creases in the transfer tape which made it harder for the letters to adhere to the tape. So I think I really need to improve my method for using transfer tape, so that all of the vinyl pieces properly stick to the transfer tape. Also my sticker was so large that I had to use multiple pieces of transfer tape and the designs which intersected two pieces of tape would constantly come off.

Laser Cutter

For laser cutter week, I was inspired by minimalistic headphone stands

In fusion I designed 3 different parts to allow me to build a headphone stand. A base plate, a base plate connectors, and then stand connectors. Trying to take those pieces and recreate something similar to the minimalist headphone stands. However, are I assembled the stand (pictured below), I realized that it was way to structuraly unstable and when I tried to put my headphones on the stand, the stand was on the verge of breaking

Since that did not work I brought it into fusion 360 and I did the assembly their first, so I can work out some of the structural issues and add more pieces to reinforce it's structure leaving me with my final iteration