Vlada Petrusenko HTMAA 2023

Vinyl Stickers

This week's assignment was to learn how to CAD, use vinyl cutter, use laser cutter, and put it all together in a project. It was my first ever experience working with CAD tools, vinyl cutter, and laser cutter, so it was definitely a lot of learning.

Inspiration & Ideas

Vinyl Cutter was a very nice tool to use, it's pretty difficult to mess it up, and result is just cool.
I initially was somewhat disappointed when I couldn't think of many uses of vinyl cutter, because I have so many stickers that just end up being unused, but I also don't know how to design PCBs so far. Sticker making ended up being more fun than I anticipated though.
I have the cup that had a design on it, but it came off, and it became a little sad monocromous cup, so I decided to add some personalization to it.
I recently got into climbing, so I decided to make a sticker of a climber to put on a cup.

Technical Process

The process of cutting was performed on a vinyl cutter, and it was pretty straightforward.
It consisted of finding a black and white png, uploading it to the modsproject, calculating, and sending to print.

It got cut - now what?

Once the sticker is cut, one needs to pick up all the extra parts of the sticker. I used a tweezer to do that, and it was pretty easy.
Then the sticker gets moved to the transfer paper, which is a transparent paper with a sticky side. The sticker is put on the sticky side, and then the transfer paper is used to put the sticker on the surface.
Even with vinyl printing some little things can go wrong though - I didn't have any major issues, however, it was a little difficult to transfer my sticker on a non-plane surface (the circular frame went slightly off, so I had to manually adjust so that it looks proportional). Nothing that a set of tweezers cannot fix though :) And I learned to appreciate transfer paper, because it allowed to transfer many little details on a relative distance to each other (one can see that the climber has a lot of separate pieces, which I don't imagine being able to put together manually).

Final Result

I really liked making stickers, so I decided to make one more - Ukrainian Tryzub, Coat of Arms. Here are the resulting stickers (both migrated to the surface of my cup shortly after).

Future work and improvements