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Motorcycles, tools, and garages! A little bit of everything mechanical and technical.

Showing posts with label 640. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 640. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Smashing Cricuts.

Well, not really, but I used a Cricut vinyl cutter for the first time today.  Lotsa fun!

I found a set of Adobe Illustrator templates for my bike several years ago and have been meaning to do this for a long time.  I designed some new graphics a couple of years ago, but still didn't get them cut.  Today was the day.  Last day of school, no students, room was all checked off and I was good to go.  Been fighting with file formats for the last week so I figured I would give it one last try, glad I did! Got them all straightened out and ran them through "Make the Cut".  The OLD version, that lets you run the Cricut like a CNC without having to cut only whats on the stupid cartridges.



Cricut doing its thing.



Peeled off the extra vinyl and had this left. Made a few stickers for my website with all of the extra space.





Used a little bit of contact paper to transfer this piece over,



The rest were just stuck on by eyeballing it.

Before:



After!



Not to bad for eyeballin it!  One side done:



Now to do the other side and finish up a few little things.

FWIW, the templates I have DO NOT fit perfectly... I had to trim a little to get it to look right, and because the tank is not perfectly flat there were a few teeny wrinkles in the vinyl.

I spent about $25 on vinyl- just used whatever my local craft store had in stock. Don't like the orange I got so I will probably order some brighter stuff but I was impatient and wanted to get it done.

Here's what my poor bike looked like before:



and AFTER!

 






You might notice I changed a*few* other small things besides the stickers... Glad it's finally back in the dirt! Hoping to do a lot of riding with the family this year... I even figured out how to stuff the bike, the 4 wheeler, and two mini-bikes on my teeny little trailer!

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Oh, and did I mention?  SCHOOLS OUT!!!