Thinking Out of the Box

Vinyl Cutting

In this section, we made vinyl stickers using silhouette studio. The first sticker I made, was my last name. To make this sticker, I created a text box, and typed my name in. Then I selected a font I thought looked cool, and selected that. Once I had selected my font, I welded the whole piece together to ensure that the cuts that were made didn't overlap and cut something off that I needed. After everything was welded, it turned into 3 separate objects, so I grouped them all together so they could move uniformly. Finally, I drew a box around the design, to ensure that when The sticker cut, it would be easier to weed all the parts that I didn't need in the final part. I used a similar process in my second sticker, but instead of using a text box, I uploaded a PNG of the Tractive logo. Once the photo was in silhouette studio, I selected the trace tool, and traced the image. I didn't need to weld the piece, due to the lack of overlapping cuts, but I did group it together. I drew another box around the image I wanted to cut, and then I was set to export the stickers and cut them. In order to cut the sticker, I lined up two different colors of vinyl where the stickers would cut, then I loaded the cut mat into the vinyl cutter. I grabbed the file and opened it in silhouette studio on the PCs by the vinyl cutters, and clicked print, where the instructions were sent to the cutter. Then I clicked print and my stickers were cut. Once my stickers were cut, I weeded the stickers by removing unnecessary vinyl, then I transferred the stickers onto transfer tape to allow for placement on other objects.

Issues

One issue that occurred was when weeding, the dot of the "i" was moving around when I didn't want it to. The issue in this instance was that the dot was too small, and caused me to have issues due to not holding it down in the weeding process.

Laser Cutting

These images are of the design process in making a small laser cut tabbed box. The first step was to draw and define the boxes, I needed to make sure they were the right size to fit exactly together. Once I had the boxes drawn out I made another smaller box that was 0.5 inches by 0.5 inches. I used this smaller square to copy and paste it as a union for the tabs I was going to make. Once I had done that for two of the rectangles, I changed the color of one, and moved it over on top of another, where only the tab overlapped with the other box. Then I used the difference button, which inserted a tab into the other box. I repeated this for the other side of that rectangle, and then again on all four sides of my biggest rectangle. Once my biggest rectangle was finished, I copied and pasted the two smaller rectangles so I would have all four sides of the box. After everything was completed, I made sure that everything had a union done to it, in order for a seamless transition into Correl Draw for laser cutting. I uploaded a plain SVG file into my enj proj folder, then moved into the laser cutting room. Once I was in the laser cutting room, I opened the SVG file in Correl Draw and clicked print and send to the laser cutter. Then I followed the laser cutter workflow down below and glued all the pieces together to finish project.

Issues

I only encountered one issue while doing this section of the project. The issue was that the laser cutter didn't fully cut through my design, it left one small section uncut. In order to resolve this issue, I modified what was being cut by turning off the scoring, and running only the vector.