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14e. The education we give customers

kerfmaster pin list · Preflight — how files come in

intentmixedWhat we want to build. Never claimed the present, so it cannot be stale — and must never be read as a description of the code.

Content last changed 2026-08-03 — computed from the item itself, not typed.

Contract — Intake stage

This contract describes a stage we intend to build — it is NOT a description of the code.

takes —

makes —

fails if A rejection message that does not teach what to do differently.

Contract last changed 2026-08-06 — computed, not typed. Dated separately from the text above, so neither date can speak for the other.

Requested by Aristide, 2026-08-01. Preflight catches bad files; education stops them being made. The second is cheaper.

Three places it lands, in order of effectiveness

  1. A template that makes the mistake impossible. Ship an Illustrator template preset to inches, 1:1, artboard at our common stock sizes, with a layer named CUT. A customer starting from it cannot produce an ambiguous file. This beats every written instruction and should be built first.
  2. The rules shown on the upload form itself, at the moment they apply. Not a PDF attachment, not a page on the website — on the form, next to the file picker.
  3. The rejection message. Every block is a teaching moment, and it is the only one we know the customer actually reads.

What we teach — the short version

  1. Send the file in the program you drew it in. Don't convert it for us. Illustrator → .ai. CAD → DXF. Never a DXF exported out of Illustrator.
  2. Tell us how big it is. Set the document to inches and draw at actual cut size, and state the finished dimension when you send it. We check both against each other.
  3. Outline all text (Type → Create Outlines). We cannot cut a font reference.
  4. Every cut path closed; interior holes as knockouts.
  5. One line per cut — no doubled or overlapping paths.
  6. Clean line-art or a flat single-colour silhouette. Fills are fine, even preferred. What we cannot use is traced-raster art — a photograph auto-traced into thousands of blobs is a picture, not cut geometry.
  7. Sanity-check in outline view (Cmd+Y in Illustrator). If it reads correctly as pure line work, it will come to us clean.

How to word a block

Never "file rejected". Always the specific thing and the specific fix:

We can't tell how big this should be — the artboard is US Letter, which is just Illustrator's default. Either set the document to inches and draw at actual size, or simply reply with the finished width.

And always with the board link, so they see their own file drawn the way we read it. Showing beats telling — that is already our delivery standard internally and it works the same way outward.

Note for later

"No stroke colour" is today's rule, but colour is the natural future signal for cut vs engrave vs score (red = cut, blue = engrave). When item 8 is decided, this education changes from "no colour" to "these colours mean these things" — so the wording should not be carved anywhere expensive.