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Vinyl and Cardstock Cutting

We have two Silhouette Cameo cutters — a Cameo 4 Pro and a Cameo 5 Alpha. They drag a small blade through thin material instead of burning or routing it, which makes them fast, quiet, and safe enough to iterate on freely.

In this class they do two quite different jobs, and the first one matters more than students usually expect.

Job one: cardboard and cardstock test templates​

Before you spend a CNC slot cutting plywood, cut the same outline in cardboard here and hold it against the real object it has to fit.

This catches the errors that clearance math cannot: a shelf 15 mm too wide for the cabinet, a notch on the wrong side, a bracket that fits the wall but not the pipe next to it. It costs a few minutes of a machine nobody is queued for, instead of an hour of the machine everybody is queued for.

The workflow:

  1. Export your outline as a DXF or SVG — see Exporting Your Design.
  2. Import it into Silhouette Studio and confirm one known dimension. Units travel badly between programs; check before you cut, every time.
  3. Set the material to the cardstock or cardboard you're actually using, load the right mat and blade, and run a test cut in a corner first.
  4. Cut, then take it to the real object and check the fit.
  5. Photograph the test fit. That photo is worth more in your journal than a paragraph describing it.

Thicker corrugated cardboard needs a deeper-cutting blade and usually more than one pass. Ask before you force a material through — a blade dragged through something too thick shreds both the material and the blade.

Job two: vinyl for finished surfaces​

Two different materials that behave differently:

  • Heat-transfer vinyl (HTV) goes onto fabric with the heat press. It's cut mirrored, because you apply it face-down. Forgetting to mirror is the classic first mistake.
  • Sticky (adhesive) vinyl goes onto hard surfaces — a label on a bin, a logo on a lid. Cut it right-reading and apply it with transfer tape.

Either way you weed the design first: pick out the parts you don't want transferred. Thin lines and small enclosed shapes are painful to weed, so design with a bit more weight than you would for a printed graphic.

Heat press temperatures and times depend on the material, and the numbers for what we stock are posted on the counter next to the presses — see Makers Tools. Use those rather than a number from the internet.

Software: Silhouette Studio​

Silhouette Studio is the cutter's own software and it's installed on the shop computers. Silhouette's own documentation covers installation, registration, and the interface:

Two notes specific to using it after Fusion:

  • Imported DXF and SVG files arrive as line art, not as cut lines. You may need to tell Studio which lines to cut. Check the cut preview before you send the job.
  • Design work is easier upstream. If a shape needs changing, change it in Fusion and re-export rather than hand-editing the imported outline — otherwise your CAD file and the thing you actually cut stop matching.

Safety​

Lower risk than the CNC, but not zero:

  • The blade is sharp and exposed when you change it. Retract or cap it before handling.
  • Keep fingers clear of the rollers while the machine is feeding.
  • Never put vinyl in the laser cutter. Cutting vinyl with heat releases chlorine gas. The vinyl cutter exists partly so nobody is tempted.