I'm curious, has anyone converted a pen plotter to a vinyl cutter. I have an older HP that I would like to convert. Thanks.

If it has the balls to move the knife, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Some pen plotters are pretty weak, barely able to get out of its own way.

Eric

I exam some winyl cutter and I see 4.rotary axis.
Knife turning at any angle. But plotter has only 3 axis. (2.5 axis)
You must add extra hardware and need modification at the firmware of plotter.

I think there are not practice way.

You could try replacing the pen cartridge with a vinyl cutting drag knife which is just an offset blade in a bearing. A lot will depend on wheter your plotter is strong enough.

I use my router for vinyl cutting and made a small assembly for this, I put some pictures of this in the photo section of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNC_Toolkit/
and have attatched one picture to this post.

Your software needs to account for the offset of the blade as it's always lagging behind the programmed position, typically by 0.3 - 0.5mm

Regards,
Rab
http://www.rainnea.com/cnc.htm

Rab,

How did you address the issue of blade offset?
Can this be done easily with existing G-code generating software like VisualMill?

Steve

Steve,

I wrote an extra algorithm into my CNC Toolkit which you can use (don't worry, it's a free beta version) if you need. It can output the HPGL plotter language so it might just work for an old plotter.

Regards,
Rab
http://www.rainnea.com/cnc.htm

Rab,

I'm just in the finishing stages of assembling the electronic components of my router. I'll give your software a try when the machine is alive.

Thanks

Steve
www.tac-pro.com