07/13/2016
The travails of invention.
Some years ago, my third Kickstarter was for a PennyGems accessory: leather storage bags. I've been planning to do a follow-up Kickstarter for it ever since.
The big difference this time around was (is?) that people would be able to get the bags personalized with their name, or maybe the name of the game bits they were keeping in that bag, or whatever.
To accomplish this, I was going to, in effect, 'brand' the bag, but instead of putting a hot iron in a campfire, the lettering would be burned into the leather with a laser.
I bought the laser cutter a year ago, and I can tell you, the lettering looks super-sharp. It's very very tricky to get the settings right, though. Not enough laser, and it comes out pale brown at best. Too much, and it looks beautiful, but as soon as you touch it, the black falls right off (the leather's gone from 'burned' to 'carbonized ash.')
Also, raster engraving is pretty slow.
So today I looked into an alternative approach; transfer 'vinyl' film. Actual vinyl is too stiff, but most of the industry products called vinyl film are actually polyurethane films, which are much thinner and more flexible.
The laser would cut the poly film by tracing the edges, rather than scanning back and forth, so it would be much much faster. On the other hand, then I have to pick out the middles of O and A and P by hand. The real potential negative, though, is that once the film is properly plucked, it's bonded to the leather (or a T-shirt or coffee mug or whatever) with a heat press.
(A) I don't have a heat press, and
(B) Too much heat or pressure will mar the leather.
Those of you who snagged some of those leather bags know that we're talking about remarkably soft leather. Expensive driving-glove-grade leather. I strongly suspect it would be *very* easy to mark that leather with even a fairly cool heat press.
But aha! I discover a blog post by a guy that describes a product called "Coolflex." It's a poly film with an aggressive adhesive that works like heat-transfer film, but doesn't need heat! And this guy is a retired R-tape executive, doing work with R-tape products. R-tape is the company that manufactures the shiny silver vinyl that I use to make PennyGems. I have ordered a total of at least half a mile of self-adhesive vinyl from these guys.
I call the distributor. Alas, they don't carry Coolflex. Ah, well. I go to the R-tape web site. I can't find Coolflex. I call R-tape. They don't HAVE Coolflex any more. They weren't actually manufacturing it, they were just the U.S. distributor for SEF, the French company that made it. SEF now has their own office in the U.S.
I call SEF America. . . .SEF no longer manufactures Coolflex at all. Period.
It's like the whole series of preposterous events regarding the double-colored paper for the laser puzzle card all over again.
Anyway, there's always a Plan B. In this case, I've got samples of low-temperature heat-set film headed my way.
