Custom
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Technology |
Early in '98 I finally got around to having that custom die made, and I am back in the custom cube making business! The die itself was made by a company in Virginia Beach... if you ever need a die made for anything, talk to Ray at VA Die & Mfg... he's a great guy.
The jig I built holds the die
snugly, so I can get extremely precise placement of the artwork
onto the stickers. It works better than I ever would have imagined.
It just so happens that I already owned a huge steel industrial
paper cutter... a wonderful thing to own, by the way... with this
giant wheel on top that you wind down to hold the paper you are
about to cut.
This incredible crush hazard allows me to apply a steady constant pressure down on the die into the jig to cut the stickers perfectly. You can probably tell that I am extremely tickled by how well this works. I have made several other breakthroughs in improvement over the old way I used to do this... instead of clear contact paper (which is a pain to work with because it's difficult to be sure it's stuck down evenly everywhere and it isn't really very strong), I am laminating the artwork side of a piece of paper, leaving the other side as paper so it will take to the tape real well. I also have found some really great tape that is wide enough to cover the whole side of nine stickers... which is a whole lot better than the old days of laying strips of 1/4 inch double side tape side by side. Add to this the color inkjet printer my gma bought us for xmas this year... and I can take just about any image and put it on the side of a cube with clean crisp completely professional looking stickers. It's really really cool.
