Vinyl cutter for dumm.. reprappers
As the hackerspace is a bit short on equipment we just have to deal with the ones we have. And as I had sort of urge to get away without buying a vinyl cutter (yet) for the lab I had already earlier ordered some vinyl cutter blades and a holder from ebay.
Cutter holder and mount
Earlier on I tried using the fan mount on the carriage to mount the cutter blade but that proved to be too flexible installation. This time the idea was to mount the blade in place of extruder. That should give enough rigidity.
Pointy end of cutter
The mount was easily sketched in openscad. There is a thread on the holder that is suitable for screwing the holder in the mount. The pointy shaft from the holder is something that could be used to control the blade (z-axis) with a solenoid or something but as the 3d printer is equipped with z control it is easier to go with that. The cutter blade itself is pretty sharp at a 45 degree angle and with holder it is mounted in a way that it swivels and follows the cut path.
Cutter holder in mount
Vinyl cutter blade mounted
Vinyl cut Vaasa Hacklab
Vaasa Hacklab door vinyl cut
Nothing wrong with the vinyl cutter setup itself. The smaller text was a bit challenging and as a first cut I just didn’t have the time to sit down and work on it.
Vinly cut Vaasa Hacklab the other half
The gcode was produced from Inkscape with gcodetools -plugin with some settings that finally did work.
Not that difficult the convert mendel90 3d-printer into a vinyl cutter.
