The Letterville BullBoard: Sandblast Stencil Cutters

This is topic Sandblast Stencil Cutters in forum Old Archives at The Letterville BullBoard.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
http://www.letterville.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/13/5042.html

Posted by Resident (Member # 1938) on :

Can anyone tell me what is the best cutter on the market for sandblast stencil. Our machine must go about 8 - 10 hours a day. It also must be spocket feed and interface with Macs.

Looking for opinions.

Thank You

Dale T. Ganser
Openwood Studios Inc.

Posted by Mel Linn (Member # 2292) on :

I'm not the longest in this business but we do alot of sandblast stencil and we have a 15 year old Signmaker IV B and are totally pleased with it. We bought it used last year.

Posted by Philippe JACQUES (Member # 664) on :

• Take a look at .SummaDirect

Summa have both good plotters and they purposes now the NCS MagiSign plug-in to drive any plotter directly from Adobe Illustrator on Mac.

Jim Dogget , from Summa, is commonly present of this board.

• More info and demo about MagiSign : take a look at

• A tips for stencil : take a look at http://www.art-sable.com. This french company has a CD of ready-to-cut artwork for stencils.
MagiSign.com

Posted by Bruce Bowers (Member # 892) on :

There are some very good cutters on the market that do a good job at cutting sandblast resist mask. I feel that the Vytek GEM series, although it was sold off to Allen cutters in New Hampshire, is still one of the the best overall cutters for mask cutting.

This why it is still held in very high regard in the monument industry. They can be found available for reasonable prices on various sign stuff for sale boards.

It is a tangential cutting head type cutter. It is mostly a sprocket feed cutter but can be used in friction mode with the clamps on the back. It can be used with 15" to 36" punched material and up to 40" material using the friction mode.

The speed is adjustable from a crawl to very fast but you will have to experiment with it to determine what is best for the material that you are using.

We still have our GEM 40 and it is still working after 8 years on the job. I will add that it has been relegated to spot vinyl duty in it's back-up role to our other two Allen cutters. We use it for mask cutting almost exclusively now.

If you need further info, I will be happy to help you out. I know the guy who fixes them (he used to work in the factory as the head service tech) and he has a line on several cutters and such.

Have a great one!

[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: Bruce Bowers ]

UBB.classic™ 6.7.2