If anyone makes a lot of their own gear, or repairs vintage gear, I highly recommend picking up a "digital cutting machine" aka die-cut machine or cutting plotter. They used to be big and expensive, but in the last 10 years there have been smaller, home versions designed for people into scrapbooking and other paper crafts. One of the biggest brands is Silhouette.
Essentially, these are compact little plotters with a tiny extra sharp knife instead of a pen. They will cut thick card stock, vinyl and other items of similar thickness with remarkable precision (I've used mine to cut solder paste stencils down to 0603 sizes). I have both a medium sized semi-professional unit (CraftROBO Pro) and a small original Silhouette (which my ex gave me when she got a new Silhouette Cameo).
What I do is get largish sheets of clear adhesive vinyl and print the overlays onto it with my photo printer using UV resistant ink. Then I apply a clear matte spray, which also contains UV blocking elements. Both the ink and spray ensure it won't fade quickly over time if exposed to sunlight.
Now, here comes the cool part: Generally I do the design in a vector graphics program like Illustrator. There's a special piece of software that takes the vector file and adds registrations to the corners before printing. Now, when I load the printed piece of vinyl into the CraftROBO Pro, a tiny LED+Photo Transistor built into the head scans it for the registration marks. Once found, it knows exactly where it is in relation to where it needs to cut. (More or less, you mark your cutouts as a special set of colors in your drawing software and then tell the software what color = what cut thickness; that's how it knows where to cut.)
I used to make custom vinyl stickers for people online as a side gig about 6 years ago like that. Now I make my own front panel overlays the same way!
You can pickup a used Sillhouette for under $100 on eBay. Might be worth looking into.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
