Author: Carl Knapp

Learning the ropes with the new vinyl cutter

Published by Carl Knapp
This past Sunday, July 6th, creativity reigned free as we came down to the space to learn how to use the new Roland vinyl cutter to design custom t-shirts with vinyl masks!

Unlike the usual screen printing method that allows for multiple copies of a design, this technique uses a vinyl mask applied directly to the fabric without a silkscreen. Screen printing ink is then applied with a foam paint roller, then, after drying, the mask is peeled off.

We look forward to using this new tool for this and other awesome techniques.

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Unveiling Our New Shapeoko 2 CNC Mill!

Published by Carl Knapp
At our open meeting on Tuesday, July 1st, we finally had the opportunity to run our Shapeoko 2 CNC mill from Inventables for the first time!

We’ve had experience with other small mills like the Mantis 9.1, so we decided to skip over the usual “Hello World”, and jumped right into prototyping a new “business card” model for Splatspace.

Here you can see the cards that were designed in Inkscape with the toolpaths in Inventable’s online Easel app.

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These will be cut on small pieces of laminate material from architectural sample collections. Durham’s reuse/upcycling business The Scrap Exchange has a huge supply of them. We adhered the sample chip to the bed with double-sided tape (just like milling a small circuit board.)

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Success! We obtained a rough copy by using a basic 60 degree carbide spade bit.

Now our to-do list includes:

  •  Purchase a range of small and medium-sized end mills and other engraving tips (single point diamond bits do a great job on glass, BTW).
  •  Try out and pick feed speeds that are safe for tiny carbide bits.
  •  Make a replaceable spoil board with tee-nuts and hold-down clamps for the Shapeoko 2.
  •  Layout sheets of multiple Splatspace cards so that we can do a dozen or so at a time.
Big thanks to Inventables for the amazing tool!

Here are some more pictures(Thanks to Allie Grey & Jeffrey Crews for the awesome footage and pictures!):

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