One of the joys of restoration is all the painting and lettering, and on freight cars you have lots of lettering, some of it small as 1" tall. I know you can get masking film cut at a number of sign shops but has anyone bought a cutter to do it themselves?

I was looking the other day at a Roland Stika SX-15 design cutter. It will cut material 12" and 15" wide making either vinyl letters or masking film. A couple places have them on sale for under $800. This machine is compatible with eithers MAC or Windows.

Anyone using one or can they reccomend another brand.

Thanks,

Richard

We do not have such a machine but let me know if you do make the investment. I have cadd files of most of the schemes we have done as well as some custom created reproduction fonts for freight cars. You might be able to recover the cost of the machine doing masks for other preservation orgainizations.

So far, I have rolls and rolls of hand cut stencils for transferring the artwork to the cars. And the IRM has a fair amount of old original very fragile railroad masks and stencils.

Bob Kutella

Some years ago I picked up a used Ioline LP3700 pen plotter, and then obtained a vinyl cutter head and offset correction ROM from K-CAD Corp. in High Point NC. I use Macromedia FreeHand software and a WinLINE plotter driver on a Windows 2000 PC to cut paint stencils for a variety of projects. One recent project was new highway signs for the EBT RR, see
http://www.totalracing.com/ebt/ebtsigns.htm

This plotter will cut vinyl up to about 36" by 36" - for large signs I piece together several pieces of vinyl stencil. It is slow but for non-production jobs does a fine job. (This setup is not suitable for a production shop turning out many stencils each day).

I recently saw one of these Ioline plotters go for about $150 on eBay. The cutter head kit cost me about $100 as I recall. Unfortunately K-CAD Corp. appears to gone out of business, so I don't know where you would get the vinyl cutter attachment. The offset correction ROM is important because the gimbal-mounted cutting blade trails the X-Y position of the plotter head by 15 thousands.

BTW I am not in the business of cutting vinyl, just do this as a hobby.