Hi Guys. This is a club I feel needs to exist. The Silhouette Cameo is a great, low price but powerful tool, and I feel it's capable of helping us with the following pinball-related interests:
1. Creating airbrush masks and stencils for playfield painting.
2. Cutting printed decals with absolutely NO unprinted material.
3. Creating DIY cabinet stencils
4. Creating masks for cabinet touchups.
5. Creating masks for the DIY creation of impossible-to-source playfield plastics.
6. Other uses yet to be discovered....
So, first of all, what is a Silhouette Cameo? The Cameo is a 12" wide plotter-like robotic cutter, capable of cutting a variety of materials. It's got a little razor blade that gets moved all around to different coordinates. These kinds of plotter-based cutters have been around for a long time, gracing us with rear window likenesses of Calvin pissing on Dale Jr. and the like.
However, it's really only recently that these types of cutters have become affordable enough for the casual user to justify owning one. I got mine off Amazon with an extra mat for $230.
Even though the Cameo is targeted at the hobby audience, I think it's accurate enough for our purposes. I actually researched this topic pretty extensively. First of all, there are number of pinsiders already using the tool for various aspects of pinball. Here are a few.
Mk1Mod0's 6M$M Cabinet Stencils
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/home-hack-making-my-own-stencils
Mk1Mod0's Acrylic Pinball Machine artwork
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-acrylic-pinball-project-i-am-clearly-insane
ArcadiusMaximus decals and airbrush stencils
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/williams-diner-restoration
rufessor's Playboy
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/bally-playboy-restore
Anyone I missed???
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Then there are the non-pinballers using Cameos for hobby purposes.
Amazing Model Railroad Scenery cut out of polystyrene with a Cameo
http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/79025-a-guide-to-using-the-silhouette-cameo-cutter/
Cutting Solder Stencils
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/download/file.php?id=10038&mode=view
Helicopters
http://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=592298
The model railroad thread has some valuable best practice type stuff for getting good cuts, and the solder one the guys are printing from Linux using an open source software and getting much better cuts than using the tools that are bundled with the cutter. Very interested in following up with this.
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So what have I done? Well, I've only had my Cameo a couple days but here goes. I scanned my buddy's Baby Pac Man and traced the problem area with Inkscape. Took about 15 minutes. I exported that to DXF, imported that to the Cameo software, then scaled it to the same width as I measured with a steel rule, to the nearest 1/2 mm. Then I printed on regular computer paper, just to test.
more to come!
Dan