Hello Apple Valley FabLab students, it's Mr. Lee and today what I'm going to show you is how to
print with the print and cut machine. First thing that we're going to do is we're going to take out
the, um, vinyl that's in here. What I have is a heat press vinyl and I'm gonna actually put in
a vinyl that is for making stickers. So I'm gonna put my phone in the stand so you can see this.
Okay, so I'm going to take off this roller and put in the vinyl
for making stickers and you can tell that it's, uh, a shinier vinyl; the way you can really tell
is because the backing is paper instead of plastic, the heat press vinyl has got plastic.
And then what I'm going to do is, put it in here,
I'm going to slide the paper through and I'll show you that in a minute. It's gotta cover the sensor
and the sensor
looks like this; you can see if I open this up and back this off, that's the sensor right
there. So we have to cover that sensor and then these pinch rollers, there's one here
and then one here, they have to cover the paper; so I'm going to have that covering right here,
if you can see that. So that's what I'm going to do next, and then once that's set,
the printer will measure that distance from pinch roller to pinch roller and we'll get that
from the computer, will access the machine. So when I lift the locking lever up, the
printhead actually moves across to measure
that distance, so now that's good to go. So the next step is going to be sending the file
to the printer, and I'll kind of rotate this so you can see what I'm doing on the laptop.
So what I'm going to do now
is select my image that I want to print and I have to do a couple things; I have to get information
on the layout and I selected, I have to get the width of the vinyl. So it's 18.54 inches wide
and I had four copies in there, I'm gonna go down to one, and then I'm gonna up it one at a time.
It looks like that's gonna fit pretty well. I'm also going to go to quality, it tells me that it's going
to take eight minutes for the print. I'm using white glossy photo paper, that's the sticker paper
and then I'm going to go down to cut controls. And I want to select the
advanced settings because I wanted to cut out the image
and you'll see on another video that, that I have that selected, so that's ready to go.
It also tells me how much vinyl I'm going to use and that's down in this portion of the screen, and
it also tells me how much ink I'm going to use; i'm going to use about 16 cents worth of ink.
So the next thing is I hit the third button over and that'll send the image to the machine;
it takes a minute to do that, so you'll see that it's actually creating the
RIP file, and once that's done, then it sends it to the machine and starts the print. So it's at about
40 percent, 75 percent, now it's done. The next thing it's going to do is send it to the machine,
so that tells me the process that it's sending the file to the machine and then once the
machine gets the file, the noise you hear right now is it's actually cleaning the print head, and that's
kind of a view of the print head underneath. And then what it does is it picks up ink,
goes across, electrostatically dumps that ink onto the vinyl,
and that this is gonna take about eight minutes; plus it's going to take a few
more minutes for it to actually cut. So I'm gonna pause this here, I'll put it back on
once it's cutting because it's kind of neat to see it cut.
So here's uh,
the print about half done and it only prints when it's going from our right to left;
that return trip is just to pick up more ink. So the ink reservoir is on the right side here
and then it sprays it out as it goes across; super accurate. What I'm going to do, I'll pause it again
and then I'll play it when it's cutting, because it's actually kind of neat to see the cutting tool.
Okay, so it's almost done printing; what it'll do next once it's done,
is it'll clean the print head and then it'll start cutting,
which is pretty, pretty neat to see. So we only have a couple more trips
and then the printhead will be, come over and cut over on the side here. And if you look underneath,
it's such a precise machine that you cannot see any ink coming out when it does print. So
now it's going back and what it's doing now is cleaning the print head, and now it's cutting.
Let's see if I can zoom in on the cutting head;
there it is and then it lifts up when it moves, and then the head comes
cut and that's it. What we'll do next is we'll put transfer tape on, cut it off the machine before
we do that, put transfer tape on; we got to weed it before we put the transfer tape and then it's done.
So now the machine's print heads' going back, it's going to eject the
vinyl and then we'll cut that off.
Okay so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take, uh, this vinyl that we've printed on our print
cut machine and we're gonna weed it, and weeding with this is really fast. I'm going to use just a
picker to do that; I'm going to pick out one corner and the, if the cut pressure was right, all we do is
we just kind of lift it up and it comes right off, so that's been weeded. I kind of like that.
Then the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to put the transfer tape on,
and like I did in the vinyl sticker
video, this one; we're going to do the same thing. We're going to lay the vinyl flat,
and sorry for the bells, once it's flat, then what I'm going to do is take the stickers
and put them on upside down and lay it so that they hit middle first. So I'm going to go like that
and kind of let the middle hit first, and then I'm going to rub it out with our spatula tool
and then I can cut off the end,
and flip that over. I'll just kind of make sure all the bubbles are out,
and this is ready to go. So what I'll do is I'll probably use, I have a
paper cutter for trimming things up, but we'll cut out one so you can kind of see what the finished
sticker will look like, and then you can also trim up the transfer tape on both sides, on all sides,
and there's my sticker. And so this can do full quality images with this print and cut
vinyl cutter. It's a pretty neat machine and that's all we got for today. Have a nice day.