Vinyl Cutter

A vinyl cutter is an essential tool in several of today’s businesses including design clothing using heat transfers and sign making. Anyone who is serious about creating an income in these areas would find the purchase of a vinyl cutter an absolute necessity. Vinyl cutters have a range of functions and cutting vinyl is just one of those. They can also be used to cut heat transfer paper or sticker paper. With the improvement in technology, vinyl cutters now come with state of the art vinyl cutter software that allows importing of different file formats including .jpg and .gif files that have a variety of designs, or even photos.

A vinyl cutter is an essential piece of equipment to any business owner or hobbyist who, for a living, wants to sell T shirts or other forms of clothing such as jeans that have transfers heat pressed onto them. In the days before this level of technology came along, patterns or photos would be printed onto heat transfer paper which then had to be manually cut out before attaching to a piece of clothing with a heat press. Now it is just a simple case of importing the desired pattern into the vinyl cutter software, making the required adjustments, printing out the design on the heat transfer paper and the vinyl cutter does the rest.

When the design is originally imported into the software, the operator determines what parts of the design the vinyl cutter will cut out and what parts will be kept. For instance, if the design is such that it has an overall border with areas of solid red inside that border that form the design, as well as clear areas within the border, it is possible to tell the software to either just cut out the border, leaving both the red and the clear areas in tact, or to cut out the clear areas from within the border just leaving the red areas. Once this has been done, the operator sends the design to the printer where the design is printed out on heat transfer paper along with three positioning marks. The heat transfer page with the newly printed design is then moved to the vinyl cutter and positioned in a particular place based on where the vinyl cutter expects it to be. Then using the control panel on the vinyl cutter, the cutter determines the size of the sheet. Once this has been done, the operator once again returns to the software and directs the vinyl cutter to cut out the design. It firstly reads the positioning marks on the heat transfer page so that it knows exactly where the design is positioned on the sheet and then in a matter of seconds, the vinyl cutter blades cut out the design perfectly. It’s then just a matter of peeling the design away from the surrounding scrap paper and applying the transfer to a T Shirt with a heat press.

Since vinyl makes up a large proportion of the materials that are used to make signs, it makes sense that a sign business would own a vinyl sign cutter. The vinyl cutter in this type of business is used in much the same way that it is used in the design transfer clothing business with a few small differences. Firstly, vinyl normally comes in a roll rather than a sheet. So once the roll of vinyl has been attached to the vinyl cutter and positioned correctly, the operator opens up the vinyl cutter software and as before, imports any required design and/or creates the writing that will be used in the sign. This information is then sent directly to the vinyl cutter. There is no need to print the design as the vinyl itself forms the final product and as a result there is no need to print positioning marks. Because sign makers use vinyl cutters to cut letters out of vinyl so often, the vinyl cutter is often called a vinyl letter cutter.

If you are looking to buy a cheap vinyl cutter then your best bet is to see if you can pick up a used vinyl cutter second hand as a good vinyl cutter will last for years. Alternatively, if you are after a new vinyl cutter, a small desktop vinyl cutter can be picked up for around $500. This is great for a hobbyist who wants to create a few T Shirts and maybe create some extra income by selling some of them. But if you have a professional business, you will look more towards a stand alone vinyl cutter with a top of the range plotter vinyl cutter printer being available for purchase for around $5000.