Beginner Tutorial 1: Loading Vinyl

The Backstory:

Before I made my first cut with my Silhouette Cameo 4 Pro, actually before I even bought it, I spent a fair amount of time watching YouTube videos. I wanted to find out where other people struggled and learn how to deal with that before I even attempted to cut my first piece of vinyl.

I found it fascinating to see people share their struggles with cutting - mats sliding, cuts not going through the vinyl, etc. 

In my perfectly imperfect video, I will share what I have learned about setting up my machine to cut vinyl on my new Silhouette Cameo 4 Pro. Most of these ideas will work on any of the Silhouette Cameos or other machines.

This video only focuses on setting up the machine. It does not walk you through setting up your computer nor does it help with cut settings.

What tips and tricks do you have for preparing your Silhouette Cameo 4 Pro, or other machine, for cutting? Please share in the comments!

Transcript from the Video:  

00:05 Step 1: Install the blade correctly

One of the most common issues with cutting vinyl is your blade installation. So when you take a look here, you don't see a space between the blade and the blade housing. So I'm going to uninstall my blade. So I'm going to put one finger on this side, and one finger on this side and pull straight out. And you'll hear a click. When I open that up properly, my blade will slide right out. The nice thing is that you can't put your blade in the wrong way. So when I put this back in, if I don't push it all the way down and I close the blade to lock it, it does a tiny click but that's it. When I take a look, I can see a big space between the blade housing and the blade. So let's pop that back open and I'm going to support by putting my finger underneath here and push down until it clicks back in. I'll test it by closing it. Do you hear that second click? When you hear that second click, then you know you've got it all the way in. Here's another way that you can check. Let's take a look at the green circle there. Do you see how that is completely filled in? When it's not installed properly, you'll be able to see a little bit of space there. So make sure that you blade is installed correctly into the blade housing.

01:52 Step 2: Clean the blade

If you're having trouble getting a clean cut and you've made sure that your blade is loaded correctly, your blade might actually be dirty. You might be saying but Sandi, I've only used it once or twice. The thing is even that once or twice, it can catch vinyl especially if you're cutting really tiny script. So the easiest way to do that is to pop that out, pull this up and check your blade housing. So, when you press down on this, you can see your blade and I've heard that you can take a ball of tinfoil and just kind of poke your blade into the ball of tinfoil to sharpen it up. Take a quick peak here and see if there's any gunk in there. There is a way to open it up but I'm not going to do that today because I've not attempted that yet and I don't want to share opening this up cause I did read somewhere someone opened it up the wrong way and springs went flying. I don't know if that's this autoblade or a different one but until I do a few more video watchings and try it out myself, I'm not going to share that with you. So, just pop that back in, support it. Make sure it goes all the way down. Ok. And then push it in. One click. Two clicks. If you can't get that second click, it's not ready to go.

03:11 Step 3: Start with a straight edge

If your machine is not catching your vinyl properly when you are trying to load it, make sure that you have a perfectly straight edge along this side. Now, I'm not sure how well you can see this, but if you were to take a look at this piece, I cut this off because it wasn't loading properly. Let me just flip it over to the other side. There you go. So, here's one edge and you can see how the other edge is just a little bit thicker but not a lot thicker. So when I cut that off to straighten my edge of my vinyl, then my vinyl loaded much easier into the machine.

03:52 Step 4: Line up your vinyl correctly

In order to load your vinyl, you need to use one of these two lines. This line here is if you are using the 24 by 24 inch mat. You'll line the edge up right along the inside of this. If you're using anything else, if you're using any other size of mat or if you're using vinyl without a mat, you'll line it up along this line. And it's important that if you're using the 24 inch mat, you use this line and if you're using anything else, you use that line.

04:29 Step 5: Set the tabs correctly (Some important information is also included in Step 6)

When you insert your vinyl, this side of the machine will grab it properly but you need to move this in order to match up to the size of the material you are using and the mat you are using, if you are using a mat. So you'll see that there are little triangles here and those are different measurements for 12 inch cutting, 12 inch with a mat, and so on. But I'm kind of lazy. So I just do it by using the actual vinyl. So, in order to move this to the correct position, I'll take this little knob and I'm going to push it down in order to push this up. And then, what I'll do, is I'll take my vinyl and I'll put it in my machine in the correct spot, and I'll just hold it, lining it up correctly, and figure out what triangle does this match up to. So I can see that I've got it in the right spot here. So let's take a look at what that looks like without the vinyl right here. So I've got it in this second triangle...so there's one group of triangles, two group of triangles and it's right there. And I make sure that this roller here is centered over the top of the triangle that I want and what that does is make sure that the roller, if you were to peek under here, you would see the roller, would catch the edge of the vinyl and be just slightly on the inside so that if the vinyl does shift a little bit, it will stay on the vinyl. When I'm done, I'll take this little bar and push it back up to push this bar back down. Make sure to do that because if this isn't locked into place then your vinyl is going to go crazy and you'll waste a bunch of vinyl and nobody wants that.

06:20 Step 6: Load the vinyl and run it through without cutting

So the next piece is to load my vinyl and 've got a very large roll of vinyl here. I'll show it to you with the cheap yellow stuff that I've got. But you can see in here I've got my roller holder here, and I've got it set for my big roll of vinyl. What I can do is undo that and move these forward so that when I've got a smaller roll of vinyl, it will hold that nicely there for me. So I just move these out. There we go. So now it's set for a small roll. Here's my inexpensive yellow vinyl that I picked up at the Dollar Store. So, I will make sure that this matches up. So, I'm on the inside line because I'm not using the 24 by 24 inch mat. And when I put it over here I can see that it fits nicely under there. I'm actually going to use the autoload feature. So, over here, you can kind of see it on the screen. I've got an up arrow. When I push it, then it will start the autoloading feature. And that will give me about 5 or 6 seconds in order to get my material into the right spot. Now obviously, normally I wouldn't be loading from the back but I'm trying to stay out of the camera way for you. So, it will start flashing and I've got my 5 or 6 seconds, to line this up neatly. I can take my time and load it up and the machine will grab it for me. So, let's try it. There we go. Now, the other thing I need to make sure is that these little nobby things here...let's see if I can get this vinyl out of the way for you...There's these little nobby things in here and you want to make sure those are spaced evenly over your vinyl so they should be spaced approximately the same distance across between your right hand side and the left hand side of the vinyl. What that'll do is prevent it from crinkling up and causing you issues. So I'm just going to grab the vinyl and stick it back in my roll feeder. Now, I don't stop there. If I'm just doing a small project, then it's not a big deal but I tend to do 5 or 6 feet or especially if I'm doing longer feet, I actually want to make sure that I've lined and loaded this properly. If I've loaded it at a slight angle or if it didn't grab it properly or anything like that, this will help identify that before I cut anything and then waste it. I'm actually going to press the down arrow on my Cameo...I'm just going to move this over a little bit so that you can see it. There you go. The down arrow on my Cameo and that'll feed the vinyl through the machine. So all of their directions are backwards. I'm not sure why but that's ok. So, let's press the down arrow and I'm just going to hold it. And my cheap vinyl is causing me issues but that's ok. If...sometimes it'll do this. I'll just throw it over the edge. I'm just going to run it through. Now you probably heard that it was catching on the back of my desk. I do have this pushed out ...farther from the wall a little bit so that it has plenty of room. But obviously, this distance would not be enough if I was using a mat. I would have to move it to a different space so that the machine has enough room to feed the mat in the front and in the back. And I should be prepared to support that mat as it comes through because the mat is being pulled down with gravity which is going to cause trouble which is really why I love cutting without my mat. So, what I'm doing is I'm feeding this through until I've gone a little bit further than my project length. So, just go a little bit further. Woah. You can see right away something happened there that my vinyl jumped. So then I would just unload it. And it's going to push it out. Now this time, I'm going to use the good vinyl. So I've reset my roll feeder to be for a wider roll and I'm going to try doing this for you using my good black Oracal vinyl. Now, some people will tell you that 150 foot roll is too heavy for this machine. Now, if you were talking the 24 inch wide vinyl...absolutely, I'm pretty sure that you would have to cut it up but I haven't tried my 24 inch wide vinyl yet. I'm still playing with my 12 inch vinyl but I will tell you 12 inch vinyl has never had trouble with this machine. Or, this machine hasn't had trouble with it. So I've got it lined up, tucked it in, and now here's the zoomed in look. So I'll do the autoload in a second. So I've got this nicely lined up to my line here, the inside line, and you know, I'll just load it. There we go. I'm just going to check the inside. That looks kind of good. Now I'm going to feed it through. Now, I'm going to gently hold this down so that you can get a good view of it but what I want....but I would not...but I would not recommend that normally. But I want you to take a look at that line as I go. So often what will happen, is that if you haven't loaded this properly, if you don't have that perfectly straight edge, maybe you didn't quite feed it in quite correctly, this will shift over and you can see a little bit of the shifting over for smaller projects - not as big of a deal but that shift on a long project is going to cause some trouble. So, my recommendation is unload it, and start again. Because what happens is that it'll start cutting at the top, work its way down your project, and then all of a sudden, it goes back up to the top. And when that happens, if it's out of alignment because it shifted over a little bit, the words, and letters, and images won't go in the spot you're expecting it to go into. So, I can not stress enough, load it, run it through further than you expect it to be and make sure it stays aligned. If it's not, unload it and do it again. The couple seconds it'll take to do that will be saved in cost of vinyl when you have to through out your vinyl because it's wrecked.

13:15 Step 7: Return vinyl to starting position without unloading it

So you can see my keypad here and you can see my loaded vinyl here. Now, if I were to push this down arrow at the bottom, that's going to unload my roll completely and I don't want that because then I have to start again. And I just did two or three attempts to load that. So we don't want to do that. What I do want to do is come up to these four arrows up here, and I want to push the up arrow to send it the other way. So I'm going to press and hold the up arrow. I'm still holding it but it stopped. So, I can let go once it's done unloading it as far as it goes. It's still nicely loaded in here. I don't have to start again. So, now I'm ready to send it from my computer to cut on the machine. Everything is set to go.

14:16 In Summary

So, for me, those are my lessons learned. Number one, make sure your blade is in the correct position. So far, I haven't actually made that mistake because that was something that I saw in a video right off the bat. Number two, when you place your vinyl in here make sure to tuck those edges up on the feeder nice and tight...so that it's not going to shift that way. Place your tab here correctly and your little tabs where they need to go. Load your mat. Run it through. Make sure it'll line straight. Making sure that your blade is clean. And with that, you should have a pretty good cut. So, that's it. Hopefully you found this helpful and learned from me some of my mistakes that I've made in here. And, we'll see you in the craft room!