Discuss the various aspects of heat pressed vinyl transfers. Popular and new types of vinyl media, suppliers, vinyl cutters /plotters, press times, quality, how to instructions and more can be found in this heat press sub forum.
I'm a little confused on something, and maybe someone can help me out.
When you go to contour cut heat transfer papers, do you need some sort of backer for the paper or do you lighten your downforce to cut only through the transfer itself and not through its own backer?
It would seem to me that it would be easier to apply another backer since the paper itself is so thin.
Another question...how would I go about contour cutting a design that I did in Photoshop?
Would I make the design in photoshop, save it as a bitmap, bring it into CorelDRAW, add registration marks and cutting shapes, then print it?
I'm a little confused by the whole process.
I admit, I could do most of my cutting with scissors or an exacto as most of my designs are within a square, but I might like to do fancy shapes with them at some point. That, and I'd like to play with our new toy.
right now i create my work in cx13, convert it to a bitmap, export to my cutters software(gx-24, cut studio) and then add my contour lines with my registration marks. its simple but sometimes the contour lines don't workout so u have to edit a little bit. i still haven't figured out how to do the plugin for cx3 yet still need some practice with that.
I *think* I have X3's plugin worked out (for our Graphtec), but I haven't tested it yet.
Do you use a seperate backing when you cut?
if u think about it that would be a good idea but u don't need to because if u have it set to thin vinyl pressure cutting then it will cut the transfer paper without it going all the way through. at least on the gx-24, i'm pretty sure all thin vinyl is pretty much the same.
How much downforce are we talking here when you cut without a seperate backer?
I need to read our cutters user manual about downforce. The machine has settings for 1-32 and I need to know what each stands for in gm's of downforce.
I think I'll try a test this weekend to see how it goes.
I have about 100 designs that I want to put on shirts for a new line (with its own website).
I was wondering the same thing, until I recently visited a company selling vinyl and the guy giving us a demo gave me a very good tip for downforce. He took the blade and holder out of the plotter and pressed it against the vinyl. That way you can test if the blade is penetrating just the vinyl or the backing sheet too. He said that one of the biggest mistakes his customers made was setting the blade too long causing it to snap. This way you can adjust the blade yourself without having to refer to the manual for each new material. Hope this helps.
So you're saying that you set it so that it's only out of the holder the thickness of the material you're cutting??? For the most part that would be okay, I guess, but some of the vinyl we're cutting is 2.5 mils thick, some of it is 4.5 mils thick, and some of it is 7 mils thick.
If at all possible I'd rather just set the downforce...
So far our cuts are perfect on whatever material we cut.
We actually did buy a new holder tho, just for our 60 degree blade, so we didn't need to reset the blade each time we changed it out.
I guess I need to measure the transfer papers we have to see how thick they are.
I cut mine on a laser cutter. Just let X3 make your contour and separate it from the image. Print the image without the contour in the sub printer, then print the contour in the laser without the image.
Registration is a snap if you keep the paper size set to the laser bed size. Just buck it up against the margins and hit start.
Contour Cutting Heat Transfers? 
