Weeding Vinyl

[Joseph Helm]

The only advice I have is… take your time, don’t rush and develop a lot of patients 🙂

The more you do, the faster and better you will become.

[Kev Mayger]

Line by line at first mate. Take your time and teach yourself to recognize the characters and or numbers which can be a pain, so you know when to slow down without removing it from the backing sheet.

[Robert Lambie]

weed from top right to left regardless of what hand you use.
most letters are open on the right hand side so self weed (so to speak) as you move along the line of text.

if you have problems "seeing" the text as you weed due to eyesight or whatever. get some chalk dust. a soft cloth and smother the cloth in coloured chalk. then dust off the loose chalk on the cloth. now using the same cloth wipe over the unweeded text and it will instantly show up all the text outlines. some folk use pounce pads for doing this, but a soft cloth will work also.

surgical tweezers help many folk… (pointed tip tweezers)

many different ways top weed… there is a video on weeding in the video section of this site.

[Martin Pearson]

Like Robert says weed Right to left except for numbers which should be weeded the other way.
Make sure your plotter is set up right and use a new blade if you can, you would be surprised at how just small changes that you might not even notice on larger jobs ca make a difference.
What sort of plotter do you have ? If you have a tangential mode then this is what you should be using for small letters and graphics with fine detail

[Lynn Normington]

Nicholas do a search this has been talked about lot’s, you will also find peoples preferred tool for this job and believe me it is diverse 😀

Lynn

[David Lowery]

quote Lynn:

you will also find peoples preferred tool for this job and believe me it is diverse 😀 Lynn

Lynn uses Peter :lol1:

[Graeme Harrold]

Reverse weed. Apply as a block to you chosen subject and then weed away. Theory being the small letters will stick better to the substrate than when they were on the backing paper…………… :lol1:

P.S. weed the centres out first……… 😛

[Lynn Normington]

No Mr. Lowery I love weeding don’t often let Peter do it 😀 I find it very therapeutic 🙄 sad isn’t it 😀

so Graeme if you reverse weed which I find very fiddly do you re- apply to backing paper or just guess where to apply??

Lynn

[Doug Pulver]

I found a good pair of tweezers, ones that are a little harder top squeeze together. They seem to give you better control.

Also I sometimes use a dental pick along with tweezers to hold the small letters down.

I agree with weeding of letters from right to left and numbers left to right.

Good Luck and practice practice practice.

[Graeme Harrold]

quote Lynn:

No Mr. Lowery I love weeding don’t often let Peter do it 😀 I find it very therapeutic 🙄 sad isn’t it 😀

so Graeme if you reverse weed which I find very fiddly do you re- apply to backing paper or just guess where to apply??

Lynn

I cut a box round the block of text and use the edges to measure placement, apply as a flood coat and immediately remove the excess vinyl :lol1: Works a treat