At Fellesverkstedet we have access to a vinyl cutter: the Roland GX-24.

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The vinyl cutter works extremely quickly and can cut small detailed lettering for exhibitions, signs for glass windows, large scale graphics or logos, small stickers etc. It can cut vinyl & paper.

In terms of size of what you can cut: try to limit your project to a maximum cutting are of 585mm x 1200mm. (In theory it’s possible to cut up to 24998 mm in length but have a chat with us before you want to do this as there are some potential problems with trying to cut this large)

The full instruction guide to the machine can be found here: Roland GX-24 Reference guide. But below we’ll describe the main steps on how to use it.

Step-by-step instructions (Material on roll)

  1. Design your graphic as a vector using a program such as illustrator or inkscape. Make sure your artboard or canvas size is 585mm wide x whatever height you require. File extensions for vector files can be: .ai .svg .eps .dxf

  2. On the pc next to the vinylcutter open your file in illustrator. Make sure you don’t have any stroke width but an infill on the parts you want to cut or else it will cut on both sides of the stroke thickness.

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  3. Choose your vinyl colour roll from our selection in the drawers and position the vinyl roll on the rollers at the bottom of the machine. Load the machine from the back as described in Roland’s Loading guide.

  4. Turn on the vinyl cutter → check the display and press “Enter” for confirming you are cutting material on “Roll”. Link for more info

  5. Position the cutting head as close to the beginning of your material (bottom left corner) as possible using the arrow keys on the machine and press the “Origin” button to set the starting position. Link for more info

  6. Test the “force” of the cutter by pressing the “Test” button. More info on this process can be found in the Force test guide.

  7. Open the print dialogue in illustrator (Ctrl + P). Make sure the Printer “Roland GX-24” is set as printer and the document is aligned in the bottom left corner, to line up with the bottom left corner of the vinyl

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  8. Press “Print” and the vinyl cutter will start. If not, you might need to do some troubleshooting, as described below.

Problems & troubleshooting

General troubleshooting: What to do if

Machine setup