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Building road signs at home using a Cricut Machine

33 pointsby annanaylast Tuesday at 10:03 PM21 commentsview on HN

Comments

charlie-83today at 5:55 PM

These are cool. For anyone in the market for a vinyl cutter I would recommend against Cricut though. Very cloud-subscription-user-hostile software that tried to limit the number of times you could use the machine you bought unless you had a subscription. I have a silhouette and control it with a plugin for inkscape and its great.

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FractalParadigmtoday at 8:12 PM

It's pretty easy to accomplish the same using virtually any 3D printer, even something as simple as an Ender 3 can be set to pause at a set layer in GCODE where the filament can manually be changed to the next desired colour. Realistically, this is only practical for things like signage, where you start with the base colour (such as yellow or green) then switch to the next for text and details, and if done properly with compatible materials, can look incredibly well-done.

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zeckalphatoday at 5:08 PM

Might want to try this font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Gothic

teeraytoday at 7:13 PM

Interesting, but I was hoping for applying vinyl to actual retroreflective sign blanks for private road use.

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JKCalhountoday at 8:08 PM

"Bear Crossing" needs rounded corners—the black outline and the cutout shape of the sign itself.

Otherwise, super cool.

downbootstoday at 5:01 PM

would cricut work for photoresist chemical etching as in the recent post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020561 ? there's a4 size rolls of vynil or even kapton

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Mountain_Skiestoday at 5:27 PM

Used to live near the highway department's sign shop for the area. When they had a job opening, they'd make up a road sign and put it up next to the street outside the shop. Which made complete sense but did seem like overkill. Guess you go with the resources you have and know.