Little tip for easier weeding fixes

[ams]

Have you ever started weeding a sign and peel up a letter or rip it and not know where it goes again?

Well if you slightly do a stronger cutting force it will leave a cut line around everything you cut, so you can peel off a letter and see the exact ghost of it, making it easy to refit it again or a brand new one perfectly in place. Don't use too much force to cut the paper.

If you use the standard 130gf, move it to 150gf. This also prevents any hang ups at sharp corners.

On my Roland GX24, I use 130gf
On my Roland GX500, I use 200gf

 

[Gino]

I was always told if you can see the knife cut in the liner, you're basically cutting too deep. That actually will turn the edge of your vinyl under and sometimes allow the vinyl to gripe fast to the cut you just made too deep, making for a harder time to weed. Anyway, that's how its been on our sprocket-fed cutters and the friction cutters.

Maybe if you used a sharper blade you wouldn't be lifting letters while weeding. I just can't imagine not being capable of not putting a letter back down ?? You can spell.... right ??

 

[ams]

How about not insulting me? It's too deep if you damage the cutting strip or cut through the paper. Try this, cut something at 80gf and tell me you can weed it with no problems. You can't because you have to recut it over again.

Just saying if you can't see the ghost image at all, increase it 10 - 20

 

[mikey-Oh]

always considered it a test of my kerning skills...

 

[Craig Sjoquist]

Yes this works, not sure about blade sharpness thing or other whatever, since I have a cheap cutter anyway and I normally take things one step at a time anyway ..
so when weeding I peel back slowly enough to watch when lifting small or cut out etc.vinyl in order to correct mishaps.

 

[Haakon]

Well, actually I believe Gino is fully correct about using a sharper blade. Just got my new GX-24 delivered a few weeks ago, and it cut cleanly on 70g with the stock blade on Oracal 651 and 751 vinyls. Until I cut reflective vinyl without remembering to change the blade to the one made for those vinyls. Now its noticably duller and I had to raise the pressure to 100g for normal vinyl to get a clean cut.

Just try to change the blades between your two GX cutters, pretty sure you need to change around the force settings between them also to get a clean cut afterwards.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

I was always told if you can see the knife cut in the liner, you're basically cutting too deep.

I was told that that you would want to see a little bit of it on the liner. I haven't really had a problem with weeding with doing that. Although I haven't really done anything smaller then 4x4 for promotional koozies. I would imagine that the smaller(thinner too) that you went, the more of a problem that would be.

 

[CheapVehicleWrap]

What Wild West Said. You ARE suppose to see a line, not a cut on the release liner. This "lubricates" the cutting point. Well not really but the silicone liner make a perfect surface to ride on. I had a Roland cam1 pnc 1000 for over 10 years. I literally cut a MILLION miles of vinyl on it over that decade. I gave the machine away a few years ago with the same exact blade I had replaced when I got the machine (along with 4 more new ones.... well 10 years old)! I was always sure to have my depth PERFECT. I had that new blade and a 60 degree for sandblast mask (which I cut much much less of) and they both cut PERFECTLY from tiny to large. I'm not making this up! 1 blade for over 10 years. for a good 5 of those years I had thousands of ads on ebay (at once) selling TONS and TONS of those stickers you're not allowed to make anymore. 1 blade, perfect settings. I wouldn't believe it myself if I didn't live it. The blade it came with was a little hammered and I wasn't sure how long they'd actually last.

 

[AUTO-FX]

nice tip on blade life, WWWraps, something i never really pay enough attention to myself and i should.

another tip -
if you are cutting really small stuff, let it sit overnite before you weed it. you may find that the vinyl pulled back just enough from the edges to make for easy weeding.

-chris

 

[ams]

Yeah that is what I mean, it isn't a deep cut, but visible enough to see and put back on without problems.

 

[signmeup]

I cut 2 mil at 60grams downforce. I can see a very slight outline of the letters on the liner.

 

[steve.leleaux]

Depending on your pressure and depth you can take a wax pencil or pencil crayon and color in the "Ghost" image of the letter you have pulled up then wipe the residue away leaving just an outline of the letter. Not a good idea if using for reverse layup as the colored pencil will be in your adhesive.