Roland Stika STX-8 vinyl cutter

Jewelry Discussion
1

This is a copy of a message I just posted to the Art Metal list.
There has been off and on talk there about vinyl cutters.

I broke down and bought a Roland Stika STX-8 vinyl cutter. It seems
to do all of the things I want it to do. It theoretically prints
directly from Corel but so far I’ve had to use cut and paste to the
cutter’s software. I’m pretty sure it’s a minor adjustment I’m not
understanding yet. I just got it up and running the day Karen
Christians and Dave visited about two weeks ago. She took home some of
the trial cuttings for her own experiments. I’ve put up a few pictures
of my first attempts with sign vinyl.

The first picture is of a latte mug sandblasted using the vinyl as a
resist. This is an evolving dragon design I hope to have fine tuned
before the year of the dragon is over:
http://www.kahiko.com/images/latte.jpg

The next is a Hawaiian fan tapa cloth pattern:
http://www.kahiko.com/images/fanmug.jpg

The third is a group shot of a 35mm hematite disc sandblasted with a
Hawaiian shark tooth tattoo pattern (nihomano) and gold leafed, a
quarter for size comparison and a brass sheet etched with ferric
chloride in another incarnation of the dragon pattern:
http://www.kahiko.com/images/group.jpg

The final one is of the brass plate with the dragon:
http://www.kahiko.com/images/brass.jpg

If I can get a little free time this week I’ll try using it for
anodic depletion of sterling silver with nitric and stainless with
nitric. I’ve

had good luck in the past with this method using asphaltum and also
nail polish as a resist. BPFink says you can get good results with
roller printing vinyl. It’s on

the to do list. I think that is partly what Karen has in mind.

John Flynn

2

Could you explain your process with your STX-8 vinyl cutter to a rank
beginner? (I have Rio’s Instant-Etch device on order–so I haven’t
even begun yet. But I’m highly interested.)

3 
   I broke down and bought a Roland Stika STX-8 vinyl cutter. It
seems to  do all of the things I want it to do. It theoretically
prints directly  from Corel but so far I've had to use cut and
paste to the cutter's  software. I'm pretty sure it's a minor
adjustment...

John,

I also have a Roland vinyl cutter and I have the same problem, I do
all my work in the Corel Draw and paste them to the Cut software, the
Corel also have a driver for this Plotter, but it works so slowly
that I gave up in the first try, it does not understand very well
curved shapes. I have already tried to contact bough suppliers but I
had no answer from them, if you get lucky to discover a way to drive
your plotter directly from the Corel let me know, it would turn my
work a lot better!

Girao from a Sunny and Hot Portugal (at least for now!)