Anyone tried the Graphtec CB09 holder and blades? I have read that they perform well for tiny text/cutting.
For smallish text I often find that the "holes" in letters do not stay put when the Gerbermask is cut.

I am going to systematically try blade depth/thickness settings to see what is optimal for Gerbermask Ultra.

I bought this item: ebay.com link: US Graphtec CB09 holder Silhouette Cameo Craftrobo Vinyl Cutter Plotter 15 blade

Once I receive it I'll do some testing to see which blades work best for fine detail work (e.g., small text).

I ordered a set yesterday. They get good reviews and they are cheap. I'll post when I test them.

Quick funny; I get emails sometime from a silhouette design lesson thing.

Today's email subject said "create pin-worthy vinyl projects" I got super excited and couldn't believe they actually would note using their machine for pinball!!!

I believe they meant something like pintrest or something

Same sort of thing I run into when I forget which thread I'm clicking on and go into the pinside vinyl thread (awesome audio thread) instead of here. Lol

How do you like the cb09? I started playing with mine a few days ago. So far so good. I'm new to the cameo so I have little to go on but it does cut better than the stock blade, imo.
Best part is the price. I got 15 blades and the holder for $20. It's a win.

Still waiting for China Post to deliver it........

So I noticed upon further inspection, my Cameo is cutting along the red path, no wonder my first sample looked funky and run together.
The cut line can be manipulated to more closely match the outline, but it so time consuming. I thought it was going to be a simple import / trace procedure of vector images but seems more complicated than I originally thought. Surely I'm missing a step somewhere.
Anyone have any tips on correction of this issue?

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You probably need to adjust your auto trace settings They are not "tight" enough. I use Inkscape, I haven't played with any Silhouette tracing facilities.

I think you will have trouble getting those tiny areas in the 5,000 to cut properly.

Personally I haven't used the auto tracing much. I usually redraw everything by hand.

I thought I'd be able to use the trace feature also but that is not the case. I've never been able to get the trace function to work well on pics or scans. The lines always need a lot of cleaning up. For me it's much quicker to trace with the pen tool. I was redrawing them in inkscape but I was having trouble with scaling and distortion so now I just redraw in silhouette studio.

Scale by 25% after importing from Inkscape.

That having been said, I have not tried the Silhouette drawing tools, I should give them a shot.

I just scan an area, clean anything funky up in Photoshop and save it as a high quality jpg. Open that in silhouette studio, trace and cut. Much easier than redrawing everything and super accurate.

Had to continue the post above after switching to my laptop to pull up an example. This is a 1 scan cleaned up in photoshop, saved as a jpg, opened in silhouette studio, traced and cut. The ONLY reason I ever fool around with redrawing something as a vector is if I need to scale it up or down significantly.

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RE the cut on the 5,000 when lit. The Drawing tools in silhouette studio are a bit rudimentary and the masking tools are worse. If your scanning that and expecting it to look like a perfect reproduction you will not find a result that matches the original. However, I believe you could coax it to do better. There are a few different controls in the trace or threshold or whatever it is (forgetting) that basically amount to your setting the black level that is used to trace and the detail of the trace route. Looking at a scan it's hard to tell how small it is but air would guess that with the right material you could cut that and get the small pieces to remove fairly well (or get them to stay if that's what you need). It's all about patience, making multiple cuts in the right material and adjusting your drawing so the cut matches reality, and then you should be good to go. I regularly adjust fine details to get the silhouette to make the cuts I want- you will probably find you need to "super size" the small details for them to cut better (and be more realistically scaled).

Someone had asked about blade angles- the steeper blades cut around corners more precisely and drag less material. They also dull more quickly and are far- far easier to break. That's the basics. For most of what we're doing here it's not going to make a huge difference, but in some instances the increased detail level with a 65 degree blade would be noticeable. Some reflective materials must be cut with a steep blade to look right.

This is accurate and has worked well for me a couple times. However when I import a scan into inkscape with it set use the file size I get a scan that's 3x the size it should be. Once you get it scaled back down, redraw it and send it to silhouette to only then have to scale it by 25% again. This always causes problems for me. Not sure why inkscape won't import my scans the correct size. Until I figure it out I'll keep doing what works. It's a shame because inkscape is a much better drawing tool than silhouette.

I'll have to try this. I don't have photoshop though. Anyone know of a free program that will turn into a high quality jpeg? What is high quality? 600dpi? 1200?

I got much better results after I adjust the cut lines in the Cameo software...

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/polishing-up-a-silverball-mania#post-3838526

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Up until today I've been using an Evolution brand stencil material. It's the only brand I can find here in Panama. It was working fairly well, I thought. Today I received a roll of oracal 813 and it is so much better. I'm using a CB09 60 degree blade and getting really detailed cuts. Can't wait to try the Gerbermask.

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Basically you want to start with a fairly high dpi scan and retain that same dpi with minimal compression upon conversion to a jpeg after editing is complete. Though my scanner is capable of 2400 dpi I scan at 1200 dpi because the file size is much more manageable and yields cut results that are indistinguishable from 2400 dpi.

Gimp seems to be a good free alterative to Photoshop.

Hold the phone, I think I just found a very simple way to get results 100x easier... and faster than retracing. (if this is covered earlier in this thread I missed it)

Procedure:
First, note the image size of desired result, once open in Silhouette, make the image as large as you can, THEN do your trace function. It should very easily determine the cutting lines, once traced, shrink the image down to the desired size and voila, the result should be a very accurate trace, even for the small stuff. See example:

The 5,000 When Lit... Graphic created and cleaned up in PS, then open in Cameo, I scale it roughly 4X of the final size, did the trace, took the result back down to the desired size of 1.5" and BOOM, did not even bother to retrace! It actually took longer to post this and "weed" the template than getting the trace accurate!
I'm a little more stoked than before now with these findings. Hope you can replicate the results!

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Awesome! I'm going to try that now.

I have joined the Silhouette Cameo club... Just ordered Cameo 3 bundle from Amazon.

So I just bought a cameo 3 that will be here today. I'm sure I'll have lots of questions. Until then, I started watching some videos and saw a trend that most reviewers preferred the cricut. Is one better than the other? It seems the cricut cuts finer detail. Should I return the cameo for the cricut or will the cameo serve me?

FWIW.... ad IMHO...

I have been using the Cameo (prior version to what you have, but difference is really just two pen holders... so I think I can at least talk about the Silhouette performance). Never used Circuit-but at least a version ago, they were similar and I felt the Silhouette was better suited to pinball work (dont remember why I thought this but I did my research and knew exactly what I wanted and needed-

I have not had any complaint in dimensional accuracy- and I have previously worked in nanoscale fabrication so I know what good looks like, and I can also tell you that the Silhouette is not lagging very far behind even the best commercial plotters- the simple fact is a knife can only cut so small a feature before the blade becomes a significant part of the dimensionality of the object and stepper motors pretty much can handle this even on small cutters- one thing that I have noted and that does get a LOT better with money and quality, is reproducibility of the line if you cut twice or three times, width of the material you can cut, blade types and software control etc... so if the circuit checks any of these boxes for you, then maybe think about a switch, I have not seen a head to head here, maybe someone can do this?!

I do note that sometimes... and its probably me, but the silhouette- after about 18 inches in length- feeding material directly, can occasionally get a bit lost on a recut... the second line may not perfectly align- its sporadic and kinda rare- and I rarely need two cuts so I notice only when doing really weird stuff with super thick materials... and I also have used mine a fair bit and maybe the belt is loose.. but anyhow this is the type of stuff money fixes... for the hundred or two that these cost the performance is absolutely amazing- I dont think you can go very wrong with either.

Be sure to post back if you find something thats persuasive one way or the other! I would be curious!

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/medieval-madness-pf-high-level-restoration#post-3960153

Anyone else aside from me and rufosor have these similar issues? Possible suggested solutions?

Does anyone have any leads on ultra-thin vinyl? The standard stuff seems too thick for doing playfield restores.

I use Oracal 751 Cast. It's 2mil thick. I haven't found anything thinner. Usually you can get it flat after clearing twice (with sanding)

Awesome, thanks!

What am I missing on buying photoshop. You can't just buy the damn thing outright? Monthly, yearly, wtf? Please link a photoshop newb to what I need to buy for Mac OS.

Nope, it's subscription based now!

Gah, what a crock. Thanks.

you can buy "photoshop elements" which has a subset of photoshop's tools and is way way cheaper. Not sure if it does what you need though.

You can buy any older version with a lifetime license. CS6 was the last lifetime license. I have CS3 - much older and less expensive and serves me just fine.

Thanks guys. I had already did the month to month because I wasn't sure of how much I'd use it. I got plain old photoshop, should have it got illustrator. Looking online it appears that's where all the tracing tools are?.

Try Inkscape it is free and does the job.

Yeah- Inkscape or illustrator is really where you want to be looking. Photoshop is not a tool that is very useful here- you want vector art- not pixels like photoshop deals with.

I am learning to adapt to Inkscape and it's fine- I like illustrator a lot better but the subscription is a POS deal and I swore off- count me in the apparently growing list of former adobe customers- although this list is apparently not very long- they seem to be doing just fine- it's really not a negative comment on Adobe, their tools are amazing and if I made my living using the, would be worth it. It is sad that they priced themselves out of the hobbiest market- and also short sighted. But whatever- use INKsCAPe and donate to them- I did- it helps a ton to fund their development efforts!

I must respectfully disagree about needing vectors. Vectors are scalable paths. That's great if you need to scale an image up or down and maintain a crisp edge. Since we are (hopefully) dealing with a 1 scan to cut process, either Photoshop or illustrator will work. I own both and rarely use illustrator. I find Photoshop easier and ultra effective for restoration work. I have found that Photoshop actually works better for working with older hand drawn art which is by nature wobbly and highly irregular.

I redrew an entire Eight Ball playfield using Inkscape, switching to Illustrator when I had to deal with professional printers. So I can print EightBall as big as a barn if I want. It was great because Eight Ball has very geometric artwork. I used FreeCAD to make many of the components and import them to InkScape. I printed directly onto my Eight Ball playfield.

Then I did a complete restore of a Xenon starting with a scan. So I learned to use Photoshop instead and as long as you are at 300 dpi minimum photo editing tools are quicker and/or you are working with hand drawn artwork. Vector tracing is pretty slow and tedious. I actually use a hybrid, I rebuild tiny details in Inkscape and export a clean bitmap (.png) file and pull it into Photoshop. The exported bitmap has perfect dithering where fiddling up close with a less than perfect scan can make give you fuzzy edges.

If I am starting from scratch I scan at 600 dpi, clean up at that level, add in Inkscape details where it makes sense. An excellent quality print at 200 dpi would look just fine but editing at that coarse a resolution is almost impossible to do by hand. I have tested vector art work and even at 150 dpi it looks okay. Don't forget that every piece of artwork becomes pixels as it hits the paper or plywood, but most commercial printers are 600 dpi or better.

I'm so glad I re-read this, I had tried using DWG and DXF before but each time I used the trace function of the Cameo, however when using DXF at least, you DO NOT need to use TRACE. Simply make sure your scale is correct and send to the cut function on the Cameo.
I'm not sure why I thought to try this but I did it over the weekend and what result! So I wanted to mention it here again to make sure you use the DXF file type and ignore the trace function of the Cameo. Check out these results, I used a standard size Exacto blade to illustrate scale, these are from the apron. I will say to generate a DXF I had to used PS to do my art touch-up, then used Illustrator to open and "clean" the image and then used the EXPORT function of AI to generate the DXF, then opened the DXF in Cameo and follow the order of operations listed above and in the post by the OP. Hope this helps.

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Those are great and exactly what I was working on when I posted here about the software. I have a hires scan and still couldn't get a clean trace in cameo. That's why I looked into adobe. There's a huge learning curve for a newb. Even with YouTube tutorials I finally quit trying illustrator for the weekend.

Another comment on vector tools- I dont really use them for their "vectorness" if that means anything- but rather because they are quite optimized for drawing- and thats what I mostly use them for. I dont think anyone would argue that using Illustrator to draw art would be the far superior experience to attempting similar in photoshop. I suppose it depends on what your doing with the tool.

Hi All,

I'm thinking of doing some playfield touch ups, has anyone here tried using the die cut stencils to silk screen with, instead of paint?

Also, I'm thinking of creating cabinet stencils....is there a preferred machine to use for that? Is there a preferred machine in general? Silhouette Cameo / Curio / Profile / Cricut etc? Does it really matter?

Thanks,
-W

Hi, I just found this topic. It's great and your work looks wonderful. How were you able to create those long stencils? Did you cut them without a mat? If so, doesn't the cutter get damaged?

thx
-W

Oooops,

I see that you had already posted the answer....I should have read further into the posts.

-W

I'd be interested too in knowing if someone has used a stencil to mask a silk screen. May be a good solution for one-off screens instead of burning a screen for it. Has to be tacky enough to adhere to the mesh.

I don't see any advantage to using stencils on a screen since you need all the other stuff for printing anyway, and you're likely to have problems since the stencil sits on the surface of the mesh instead of embedded in it like regular emulsion.

I'd certainly use a stencil to expose a screen, though - very nice straight lines.

I've sen youtube videos of people doing this for shirts. If it works, it would sure beat that photo emulsion stuff.

How do you scan accurately? With a camera?

I use one those flat HP scanners. I got if off eBay.

I just got one yesterday. When mine scans, the resulting image has stripes going across the image. As in If an area is supposed to be solid blue, it gives alternating stripes of blue with a blue that is a slightly different blue. If you squint, it looks like the correct color.

Have you experienced this?

I have. Not always. I haven't yet figured out why it happens sometimes.