Join the Signmaker yahoo group. There are lots of MUTOH users on there. It may well work with generic HPGL plotter drivers but those can be hard to find for XP if that is your OS. Unlike plotters and printers a lot of the vinyl cutters need an output program (spooler) that will let you control the options on the cutter from the cutting software. There are some issues with drag knife cutting that need to be addressed when using a plotter as a cutter. The down force for vinyl cutting needs to be adjsustable and is critical. You can just stick in a sheet of vinyl and do a cutout. It has to have a backer media that holds the cut objects in place or they end up wrapping around your feedwheels and the knife blade. Sign vinyl comes with a backer paper but the down force has be set so the knife does not slice through everything. Also the knife holder normally has an adjustable nose piece that controls the depth to an extent. Without both you are in for a frustrating experience.
The nature of the knife means that you need to deal with the fact that there is undrcut and overcut and problems when changing direction (like on a 90 deg corner). Most of the vinyl cutters have special electronics that lift the knife at a corner and then offset the cut going in the other direction so the two cut lines cross. To get some feel of this take an exacto knife and hand cut some complex shapes without lifting the blade out of the cut and never stopping motion.
You can make it work but is not as simple as just replacing the pen with a knife. With the cost of vinyl cutters below $1000.00 it starts to become a toss up on spending all the time and money to convert a plotter that will do marginal work VS just buying a new or used vinyl cutter with drivers.  |