advice on Vinyl Slitting please?

[Reza Faezi]

Hi Paul, when you say slit ….. can you explain a bit more about what you are trying to do

[Robert Lambie]

this is basically how its cut on a log.

personally, if urgent… roll out lets say 15ft of vinyl. cut off what you dont need and feed it into the plotter.
your not going to run lines/graphics longer than that anyway.

as shown in the video below

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[Phill Fenton]

I’ve used an ordinary chopsaw to slice a roll (Including the cardboard core). It’s a but rough at the edges but you can still use the sawn down roll in a plotter

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[Andrew Blackett]

I do the same as Phill – I cut down banner like this quite often.

Andy

[Andy Taylor]

quote Robert Lambie:

as shown in the video below

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whats that machine called and is the cutter also rotating as well as the log??

[Steve McAdie]

It’s called Genesis, look at smartslitters, looks to me like the blade is free turning as it only revolves on contact.

Steve

[Simon Worrall]

quote Phill Fenton:

I’ve used an ordinary chopsaw to slice a roll (Including the cardboard core). It’s a but rough at the edges but you can still use the sawn down roll in a plotter

Phill, Andy, practical as always. Problem solved! I like it!

[Simon Worrall]

I’d probably turn the blade to 90 degrees before I cut it though!

[Fabrice Menard]

quote Phill Fenton:

I’ve used an ordinary chopsaw to slice a roll (Including the cardboard core). It’s a but rough at the edges but you can still use the sawn down roll in a plotter

are you able to cut a full roll with it in one go or do you cut in several times by turning the roll each time?

[Tim Painter]

It’s a bit like a lathe to rotate the core and it looks like the one in Robs link has the cutter driven also I presume to stop it skidding.

The same sort of set up is used to cut rolls of foil for foil blocking / hot foiling. Although the cutter usually isn’t driven.

[Robert Lambie]

yeh, looks like the blade is spinning too. might be free spinning though as i dont see wires or any motor as such. as tim says, maybe to reduce friction.
maybe some of the good suppliers out there will put us out our misery with the proper answer? 😉 :lol1:

[Warren Beard]

Erm ……. About 20 years ago I used to have to slit down large rolls of self adhesive vinyl to run various widths on flexographic printers, the company had its own splitter and was extremely simple. You loaded the roll on one side and then attached the other end to a take up unit, there was rail across the middle with blades attached to small holders on a wing nut so they could be moved in to what ever position you wanted to make up a number of different width rolls out of the one large roll, press the blades through the vinyl and run the machine and it slits as it runs through.

It was a properly build machine as it had to run true otherwise the whole roll would go off and these rolls were 500m long by about 1.5m wide so had a lift to raise it up etc but the actual slitting process was very simple.

There might be more modern machines these days 😳

[Colin Crabb]

Something like this:

Used for slitting rolls of vinyl, cork, rubber, etc – not common outside manufactors or larger suppliers.

I also have used a chop saw!!!! (Was lucky enough to have a very fine, large number of teeth blade in my workshop kit used for laminate trimming which seemed to help)