Voyager keyboard overlays

[brouhaha]

I wanted to make some Voyager keyboard overlays, similar to what Eric Rechlin has made for WP-34s etc. Eric has been generous with advice on overlay making. I use a Silhouette Cameo 4 CNC cutter, and Silhouette brand printable vinyl sheets. These particular vinyl sheets are probably not the best material for a real overlay, because the adhesive is fairly weak (probably intended to be easily removable) but I'll search for better material later.

Anyhow, after taking measurements from a 2400 DPI scan of an old 12C, I wrote a C++ program to generate a PDF file with the cutting paths. I can get four overlays on one US A-size (8.5 x 11.0 inch) sheet. It might be possible to get six per sheet by rotating them 90 degrees, but I'm not sure if there will be enough room in the available cutting area when feeding sheet stock with no cutting mat.

I'm not yet actually printing anything on the overlays. I just wanted to do a fit check. I tried #20 bond copy paper first, but even with a low-tack cutting mat, it curls too much on removal from the mat to be very useful, so I proceeded to cutting vinyl.

photos

The photos show my first cut (literally) at the vinyl overlay. One photo shows just the unapplied overlay sitting on a desk, and the other shows it applied to an actual 12C (a Chinese-made singe-coin-cell variant). I cut a second and put it on a Singapore 1994-made button cell variant, and the fit is the same. It's possible that some fine tuning should be done.

For a different project, I've printed on the vinyl with an HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 inkjet printer, and then cut with the an old Silhouette Portrait. It was very tricky to get the print and cut aligned, which is why I've switched to a Cameo 4, which can detect alignment marks in the printing. Unfortunately even with the alignment marks, I found that the alignment is very good at the top of the page, and gets progressively worse toward the bottom of the page, ending up off by around 2 to 3 mm. I'm wondering whether my printer has an inaccurate Y axis, or the cutter does.

The vinyl will either need some spray coating, or to be laminated, in order to protect the printed legends.

I'll probably try to make overlays for the DM12L etc. later.

I'm fed up with HP inkjet printers and the various tactics HP has used to lock people into their ink cartridges and more recently, into ink subscriptions. While I have only used genuine HP ink in my printer, I've had enough hassles that I'm seriously considering switching to an Epson EcoTank printer. The cheapest one sold for "home & small office" uses all dye inks, and the rest in that category use dye for colors and pigment for black. I really want pigment for all the ink, and for that you have to buy the rather more expensive "business" printers. But given how much cheaper the Epson ink is than HP ink, I think it will be worth it.