In this series, we will show you how to complete a vinyl cutting project using CNC Stylus and SmartBench.

What we will make

Our project is to make some animal stickers.

Process overview

Here’s a flow chart to illustrate the processes involved, followed by links to each article in this tutorial.

These are the areas we will cover:

Vinyl preparation

• What vinyl can I cut?

• Which blade type should I use?

• How do I change a blade?

CAD/CAM file generation

• Generating files for vinyl cutting

• Job setup

• Drawing features

• Toolpath assignment

• Exporting a job file

• Transferring files to SmartBench

CNC Stylus preparation

• Loading the vinyl cutting cartridge into CNC Stylus

SmartBench preparation, tool set & operation

• A good base board for vinyl cutting 

• Do I need a self-healing mat

• Holding the vinyl down to cut out

• Setting the X beam

• Setting the blade in the vinyl cutting cartridge

• Loading the vinyl cutting cartridge into CNC Stylus

• Loading CNC Stylus into SmartBench

• Setting the XY datum

• Setting the Z datum

• Starting the job

• Finishing the vinyl cutting job

Top tips and troubleshooting

• Top 5 drawing mistakes

How to work through this tutorial

There are a number of ways to work through this tutorial with us. Either:

• Work through our Knowledgebase articles in order. The tutorial is broken down into a series of bitesize articles. We show the video for that article, written stages and we link to any resources you may need.

• Or, follow the YouTube videos:

  • Combination video

  • Playlist of videos