Turning An Old 3D Printer Into A Vinyl Cutter For Cheap

June 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Replacing a 3D printer’s extruder with a cutting blade seems like an easy way to do things like vinyl cutting, but you cannot just put on any blade and expect good results. The right type of blade is called a drag knife and it’s designed so that it follows the direction in which you’re cutting. You can get these in dedicated vinyl cutting machines, as well as in the form of attachments for the likes of CNC machines. How to use them with an old Anycubic Mega S FDM printer is demonstrated by [Cocoanix 3D Printing] in a recent video.

For a bit more background information you can peruse for example this write-up by [Kronos Robotics], who goes through the steps of selecting the right blade, cutting mat and such for use with a CNC machine.

For the 3D printer in the video a Roland vinyl cutter style holder and blades were bought off AliExpress, for which then a custom 3D printed mount was designed, though you can often get a ready-made one off your usual 3D model sources. Following this you get into the hardest part, being the software and making sure you don’t cut too deep into the vinyl through its backing paper.

Fortunately most of the hard work here is done already by the Polycut project, which is precisely designed to help you turn a 3D printer or similar into a vinyl cutter or plotter. This takes in an SVG file and generates the appropriate g-code, after which you better have gotten your Z-offset calibration right if you want that perfect result. With all that in place it’s then actually quite easy to cut your very own vinyl without shelling out big bucks for a dedicated machine.

Of course, it’ll likely never be as fast as those machines, requires more calibration and have a more limited cutting space, but as it’s not a permanent modification and probably less crazy than putting a laser engraver module on a commercial FDM printer like the Bambu Lab H2D.

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Solder Stencil Done Three Ways

June 6, 2025 by Matt Varian 30 Comments

This project, sent in by [Henk], goes through a few different ways to make a solder stencil using a vinyl cutter, a CO2 laser, and a fiber laser.

The project starts with identifying a method to convert the board’s Gerber files to a PNG, which is ultimately used to create a vector file for use with the laser. The first stencil, made with the CO2 laser, was cut out of masking tape. This worked fine for larger cutouts and is certainly a cheap option if you don’t have too many small components. A slightly better approach with the CO2 laser was using vinyl sheet release paper, which seemed to hold together better than the tape.

Laser-cut masking tape works, but not for long.

A vinyl cutter was also used as an experiment, but it didn’t perform as well as the CO2 laser, as expected, since the cutter uses a knife rather than light, leading to some tearing issues.

The final method utilized a fiber laser and an empty drink can to create a metal stencil. First, the can had to be cut open, heated, and flattened. The fiber laser was able to cut clean footprints in the aluminum, creating a stencil that would hold up to more use than the paper variations.

The finale of this exploration into laser stencil making was using the fiber laser to solder the board together. The stencil was used to spread paste on the pads, parts were placed on the board, and then the fiber laser heated the solder paste to solder them to the board. The board looked a bit toasty afterwards, but we imagine the process could be fine-tuned to reduce the collateral damage a bit.

Once you’ve got your stencil ready to go, you can combine it with a 3D printed jig to hold the PCB while you apply the solder paste.

Micro Jeep Model Kit Is Both Business Card And Portfolio

March 7, 2024 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

When finding work in product design and prototyping, two things are important to have at hand: a business card, and a sample of one’s work. If one can combine those, even better. Make it unique and eye-catching, and you’re really onto something. That seems to have been the idea behind [agepbiz]’s 1:64 scale micro Jeep model kit that serves as an “overcomplicated” business card.

Complete with box and labels in a shrink-wrapped package.

At its heart, the kit is a little print-in-place model kit that looks a lot like larger injection-molded model kits. Completing it is a custom-made box with custom labels, and it’s even shrink-wrapped. The whole thing fits easily in the palm of a hand.

There’s a lot of different tools effectively used to make the whole thing. The model card itself is 3D printed in multiple filament colors, and the box is constructed from carefully glued cardstock. The labels are custom printed, and a craft cutter (which has multiple uses for a hobbyist) takes care of all the precise cutting. It’s an awfully slick presentation, and the contents do not disappoint.

Get a closer look in the video, embedded just below. And if you like what you see, you’re in luck because we’ve seen [agepbiz]’s work before in this mini jet fighter, complete with blister pack.

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Brass Plaque Honors Brother

August 3, 2022 by Brian McEvoy 10 Comments

Brass plaques are eye-catching because no one makes them on a whim. They are more costly than wood or plastic, and processing them is proportionally difficult. [Becky Stern] picked the medium to honor her brother, who enjoyed coffee, motorcycles, and making things by hand. She made some playing card-sized pieces to adorn his favorite brand of hot bean juice and a large one to hang at his memorial site.

The primary components are a vertical salt water bath, DC power supply, metal to etch, scrap steel approximately the same size, and a water agitator, which in this case is an air pump and diffuser stone. You could stir manually for two hours and binge your shows but trust us and take the easy route. The video doesn’t explicitly call for flexible wires, but [Becky] wisely selected some high-strand hook-up leads, which will cause fewer headaches as stiff copper has a mind of its own, and you don’t want the two sides colliding.

There are a couple of ways to transfer an insulating mask to metal, and we see the ole’ magazine paper method fail in the video, but cutting vinyl works a treat. You may prefer lasers or resin printers, and that’s all right too. Once your mask is sorted, connect the positive lead to the brass and the negative to your steel. Now, it’s into the agitated salt water bath, apply direct current, and allow electricity to immortalize your design.

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Ride DIY Or Die This Badge-Less Suzuki

July 3, 2022 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

A few years ago, [Charles] picked up a sweet Suzuki motorcycle that checked all the boxen: it was in good shape, bore a few useful upgrades and a box of spare parts, plus the price was right. Though he assumed that he had pored over every picture on the classified site before buying, it wasn’t until later that [Charles] realized that something was indeed missing from the bike — a piece of chrome that does little more than to cover the tee in the brake line and bear the Suzuki brand. Once he saw the problem, he couldn’t un-see it, you know? And at that point, he just had to have that little piece, even if he had to make it himself.

That wasn’t the original plan, of course, but bike parts are expensive to begin with and only get worse as size, condition, and rarity increase. [Charles]’ quest to find this piece was halfway successful; he found a reasonable-but-rusty facsimile of the right part, although the emblem portion was long gone. Then he remembered the wife’s vinyl cutter.

Now, let’s stop right there. If you know anything at all about these vinyl cutters, you know that they are basically glorified 2D plotters with a knife attached where a pen would be. Send it any 2D file and you’re good? No, no; of course not. These things are locked down by the manufacturers.

Fortunately, [Charles] found inkscape-silhouette, which makes light work of sending SVGs to the machine. After much back and forth and maybe a bit of coin-flipping, [Charles] settled on the classy, stylized ‘S’ version rather than the full-on Suzuki badge. We think it looks great, and we’ll never tell anyone.

While this isn’t quite the type of badge we’d normally talk about, it’s a great project nonetheless, and it’s always nice to hear about projects that open up otherwise closed-source hardware.

From Printer To Vinyl Cutter

July 2, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 14 Comments

Some might look at a cheap inkjet printer and see a clunky device that costs more to replace the ink than to buy a new one. [Abhishek Verma] saw an old inkjet printer and instead saw a smooth gantry and feed mechanism, the perfect platform to build his own DIY vinyl cutter.

The printer was carefully disassembled. The feed mechanism was reworked to be driven by a stepper motor with some 3D printed adapter plates. A solenoid-based push/pull mechanism for the cutting blade was added with a 3D printed housing along with a relay module. An Arduino Uno takes in commands from a computer with the help of a CNC GRBL shield.

What we love about this build is the ingenuity and reuse of parts inside the old printer. For example, the old PCB was cut and connectors were re-used. From the outside, it’s hard to believe that HP didn’t manufacture this as a vinyl cutter.

If you don’t have a printer on hand, you can always use your CNC as a vinyl cutter. But if you don’t have a CNC, [Abhishek] shares all the STL files for his cutter as well as the schematic. Video after the break.

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Making PCBs With A Vinyl Cutter

April 1, 2020 by Richard Baguley 26 Comments

You might assume that you need a lot of expensive stuff to make your own PCBs, but that isn’t the case: you can do it with a vinyl cutter and a few common chemicals and tools. [Emiliano Valencia] has laid out the entire process. While we’ve seen plenty of make your own PCB guides before, this one goes a bit further as it covers using the vinyl cutter to make solder masks, so you can use it for surface mount designs.

The end result of the process that [Emilano] lays out is the tinyDice, a cute little electronic die that can fit on a keyring. The whole process is very well written up, and even experienced PCB makers will probably find a few useful tricks here.

The really interesting part for us was using the vinyl cutter to make three parts of the process: the etching mask, the solder mask that protects the traces and the solder stencil that applies the solder to the pads for surface mounting. Continue reading “Making PCBs With A Vinyl Cutter” →