another summa issue my maintenance company can't deal with..

[Clem]

this last year we've recently changed from graphtec fc8000 to Summa due to ongoing issues with the print/ cut issues to which the maintenance companies flat out said 'we don't know whats going on'.. for nearly a year, with production grinding to halts at some point most months.

We got a tangential plotter in the t160 from Summa, but have recently had sporadic issues with it too.

this is a thread i posted recently showing one issue
http://www.signs101.com/forums/showt...ng-paths-twice

and more recently the cutlines are not lining up with the print, which was one of the main reasons we went to summa in the first place! the printing straightness optimization (which compensates for any warping of the media from heat) has been corrected as it was out by 5mm which looked to have fixed the problem, but this was printed/ cut this morning..

I don't know how to tag people in a thread yet but if you're reading this Bly, maybe you've crossed this bridge too and have some insight?

 

[Bly]

Is that off a latex printer mate?
If so you need to use Opus XY to correct for media heat distortion.

 

[ProPDF]

There could be a million reasons why this is happening. We had this problem with material that had a low weight liner but if you have been dealing with this you probably have tested a ton of material by now? If not try other material with same file. Also Summa's can track great but if the tension is incorrect on your laminator this can cause what appears to be skew issues. Hand laminate pieces and go from there. If your cutting thick material and it's not perfectly smooth on the surface it can cause this, its so hard to tell though with the naked eye of your laminate is smooth. Start with simple cuts on non laminated material. We also saw this when cut paths were created in flexi and it would make the cuts based off when the cut path was created in file creation....crazy but it would start cutting the front of the job then go to the middle...then go back to the front and so forth reeling it in and out many times. Always use bleed though no matter what!! We were under the impression the summa's were perfect...they are you just have to dial them in especially on thicker material. Make sure the blade and it's depth are perfect too. Once dialed in make notes and keep them on file.

 

[dan1942]

I have the same issue with my T160 as well. My 1st part of the problem was with Onyx which I got fixed with the latest patch. Everything was working perfect and now I am starting to see some alignment issues. I keep this summa going right now about 6 days a week 12 hours a day cutting small decals with the same material and when I have to go back and reprint and re-cut something it really messes production up. I did call up summa about the issue and they suggested maybe the cutting strip could be getting worn out? I did not see any grooving but I ordered 3 more strips anyway and they also said to replace the blade too to see if that helps. I did slow down my velocity as well which has seemed to help until recently. Let me know if you come up with anything! I am calling summa today about ordering a second T160 I will ask them again
Dan

 

[Clem]

Is that off a latex printer mate?
If so you need to use Opus XY to correct for media heat distortion.

Yeah we got that sorted pretty quick, i mentioned above it was out by 5mm! i couldn't believe it could warp the media so much, especially as the liner is quite thick kraft paper.

 

[Clem]

There could be a million reasons why this is happening. We had this problem with material that had a low weight liner but if you have been dealing with this you probably have tested a ton of material by now? If not try other material with same file. Also Summa's can track great but if the tension is incorrect on your laminator this can cause what appears to be skew issues. Hand laminate pieces and go from there. If your cutting thick material and it's not perfectly smooth on the surface it can cause this, its so hard to tell though with the naked eye of your laminate is smooth. Start with simple cuts on non laminated material. We also saw this when cut paths were created in flexi and it would make the cuts based off when the cut path was created in file creation....crazy but it would start cutting the front of the job then go to the middle...then go back to the front and so forth reeling it in and out many times. Always use bleed though no matter what!! We were under the impression the summa's were perfect...they are you just have to dial them in especially on thicker material. Make sure the blade and it's depth are perfect too. Once dialed in make notes and keep them on file.

thanks for the reply!
We only have one media for print/ cut, and we've been using it since we got the summa a couple of months ago, it's a great media, premium polymeric, and i dont think we'd switch to accommodate a plotter issue.
the kraft paper liner on this media is quite thick, that being said, as i mentioned through heat lone it was warped by 5mm:/

When we were doing the testing after each adjustment we would test on an unlaminated piece, then once it looked good on those we went to laminated pieces and everything was cutting great again for a week or so, now this.

Yeah, i use bleed when i can, but for a lot of decal jobs i need a white boarder a couple of mm thick around the art which is usually where you'll notice even minor deviations of the cut path. the ladybug was one of those jobs.

As for your sorting issue, have you used the panelling function? I thought the sorting ability of the graphtec through cuttingmaster3 was good, but panelling with summa has got it beat for sure. it's in the Advanced Cutting menu and well worth a look if you havent checked it already.

 

[Clem]

I have the same issue with my T160 as well. My 1st part of the problem was with Onyx which I got fixed with the latest patch. Everything was working perfect and now I am starting to see some alignment issues. I keep this summa going right now about 6 days a week 12 hours a day cutting small decals with the same material and when I have to go back and reprint and re-cut something it really messes production up. I did call up summa about the issue and they suggested maybe the cutting strip could be getting worn out? I did not see any grooving but I ordered 3 more strips anyway and they also said to replace the blade too to see if that helps. I did slow down my velocity as well which has seemed to help until recently. Let me know if you come up with anything! I am calling summa today about ordering a second T160 I will ask them again
Dan

Hey Dan.
i checked my cutting strip and there was some slight grooving. i think i'll order a couple, if at least to have on hand, but do you think that would really be the issue?

haha the velocity has me on edge! cutting 1m/s was terrifying when they first showed me, default is around 300-500mm/s depending on material.

yeah, i'll keep you posted man, i emailed them first thing yesterday. still haven't received a phone call or email.. at least they're consistent i guess

 

[PHILJOHNSON]

Hello Altapac,

Sorry to hear about the difficulties with your Summa cutter. As was mentioned previously, these cut inaccuracies can occur for a number of reasons including thickness of material, type of laminate, file corruption, output settings, etc. so it is hard to tell what might be causing the problem in this case without a bit more detail.

What type of material is this? How thick is the material and laminate? Which blade is being used and at what pressure and speed? What software is being used to generate the file and what cutting program are you using to output? Have you tried printing this file on thinner film like a cast vinyl? If so, did you have similar accuracy problems?

If you could send me a PM with all the details and/or the file I'm sure we can figure out what is causing the problem. My email address is philj@summa.us if you would prefer to email me the information.

Best regards,

Phil Johnson
Summa Inc.

 

[Bly]

A couple of other things to consider.
Some media's liner seems to slip on the rollers making it run out of whack after it gets going. So try another type of vinyl.
We also had an issue recently where the cutter couldn't find the rego marks. Seemed that the Winplot Illy plugin was making the marks slightly the wrong scale.
We uninstalled the plugins, d/loaded the latest version and it's been fine since.

 

[Clem]

Hello Altapac,

Sorry to hear about the difficulties with your Summa cutter. As was mentioned previously, these cut inaccuracies can occur for a number of reasons including thickness of material, type of laminate, file corruption, output settings, etc. so it is hard to tell what might be causing the problem in this case without a bit more detail.

What type of material is this? How thick is the material and laminate? Which blade is being used and at what pressure and speed? What software is being used to generate the file and what cutting program are you using to output? Have you tried printing this file on thinner film like a cast vinyl? If so, did you have similar accuracy problems?

If you could send me a PM with all the details and/or the file I'm sure we can figure out what is causing the problem. My email address is philj@summa.us if you would prefer to email me the information.

Best regards,

Phil Johnson
Summa Inc.

Thanks very much Phil, emails away.

 

[Bly]

If you're using the straightness optimization feature on the printer I'd turn that off and just let the Summa Opus XY do it.

 

[Clem]

A couple of other things to consider.
Some media's liner seems to slip on the rollers making it run out of whack after it gets going. So try another type of vinyl.
We also had an issue recently where the cutter couldn't find the rego marks. Seemed that the Winplot Illy plugin was making the marks slightly the wrong scale.
We uninstalled the plugins, d/loaded the latest version and it's been fine since.

our rego marks are generated through posterprint, but i'll do some testing making them through winplot and see how we go, thanks for the suggestion

 

[ProPDF]

thanks for the reply!
We only have one media for print/ cut, and we've been using it since we got the summa a couple of months ago, it's a great media, premium polymeric, and i dont think we'd switch to accommodate a plotter issue.
the kraft paper liner on this media is quite thick, that being said, as i mentioned through heat lone it was warped by 5mm:/

When we were doing the testing after each adjustment we would test on an unlaminated piece, then once it looked good on those we went to laminated pieces and everything was cutting great again for a week or so, now this.

Yeah, i use bleed when i can, but for a lot of decal jobs i need a white boarder a couple of mm thick around the art which is usually where you'll notice even minor deviations of the cut path. the ladybug was one of those jobs.

As for your sorting issue, have you used the panelling function? I thought the sorting ability of the graphtec through cuttingmaster3 was good, but panelling with summa has got it beat for sure. it's in the Advanced Cutting menu and well worth a look if you havent checked it already.

No we did not go the paneling option route. We dropped flexi and the pc platform all together and went with a imac and caldera. So much better! We chose caldera after doing a demo cause caldera (and your onyx) offer the option to use barcodes with summa on each job via summa postnet barcode functions. We didn't find a ton of info on the barcode function but it's amazing compared to what we were doing. We ended up making the jobs smaller and send them to caldera. Once the summa barcode option is selected in the rip it adds barcodes and registration marks automatically. After printed and laminated (if you laminate the roll) load the media into the summa. Find the first registration mark on the first job and then away it goes on the entire roll if you desire for truely automated cutting. No more clicking cut per job and lining up the first registration mark of each job, just the first job and first registration mark. Once setup it can basically cut overnight and then have them stacked in the a.m. This function was worth it's weight in gold for us. Onxy has this option too. So if you must use the vinyl your using try making the jobs shorter if possible with barcodes turned on. The issue we had like others mentioned was slipping of the liner and the laminate surface was not perfectly smooth. Also you can run onyx on your imac, go get a windows 7 or 8 professional original cd. Go to applications in the mac and click bootcamp. It will run you through the install and command r on bootup (I believe) turns the whole mac into a fully functioning pc. The monitors on the imac's are great for viewing color too vs other monitors we looked at. The VMware and other softwares that claim to run windows never worked for us, always crashed. We were already designing in illustrator on macs due to the screens and speed out of the box on a mac so it was a smooth transition after a month of dialing it all in. Your summa and mutoh kona cutters are the only ones we know of that work with caldera and onyx barcodes. Flexi does not...nor do they seem to show interest in adding the postnet barcode option for those reading and wondering about flexi.... another reason we dropped flexi was they have known issues exporting files with transparencies to illustrator...forcing us to rebuild a ton of files. They don't like to tell people this in fact they told us this was fixed in the cloud but we did the cloud demo and none of our flexi 10 files with transparencies would convert or work outside of flexi 10 correctly. The cutting can be frustrating and we had moments where we were ready to catch the summa on fire but it's all a learning process wasting a lot of money....consider it paid tuition lol.v

 

[dan1942]

No we did not go the paneling option route. We dropped flexi and the pc platform all together and went with a imac and caldera. So much better! We chose caldera after doing a demo cause caldera (and your onyx) offer the option to use barcodes with summa on each job via summa postnet barcode functions. We didn't find a ton of info on the barcode function but it's amazing compared to what we were doing. We ended up making the jobs smaller and send them to caldera. Once the summa barcode option is selected in the rip it adds barcodes and registration marks automatically. After printed and laminated (if you laminate the roll) load the media into the summa. Find the first registration mark on the first job and then away it goes on the entire roll if you desire for truely automated cutting. No more clicking cut per job and lining up the first registration mark of each job, just the first job and first registration mark. Once setup it can basically cut overnight and then have them stacked in the a.m. This function was worth it's weight in gold for us. Onxy has this option too. So if you must use the vinyl your using try making the jobs shorter if possible with barcodes turned on. The issue we had like others mentioned was slipping of the liner and the laminate surface was not perfectly smooth. Also you can run onyx on your imac, go get a windows 7 or 8 professional original cd. Go to applications in the mac and click bootcamp. It will run you through the install and command r on bootup (I believe) turns the whole mac into a fully functioning pc. The monitors on the imac's are great for viewing color too vs other monitors we looked at. The VMware and other softwares that claim to run windows never worked for us, always crashed. We were already designing in illustrator on macs due to the screens and speed out of the box on a mac so it was a smooth transition after a month of dialing it all in. Your summa and mutoh kona cutters are the only ones we know of that work with caldera and onyx barcodes. Flexi does not...nor do they seem to show interest in adding the postnet barcode option for those reading and wondering about flexi.... another reason we dropped flexi was they have known issues exporting files with transparencies to illustrator...forcing us to rebuild a ton of files. They don't like to tell people this in fact they told us this was fixed in the cloud but we did the cloud demo and none of our flexi 10 files with transparencies would convert or work outside of flexi 10 correctly. The cutting can be frustrating and we had moments where we were ready to catch the summa on fire but it's all a learning process wasting a lot of money....consider it paid tuition lol.v

Are you running it with the takeup reel option?? Is there a way to make the summa do a cut sheet in between jobs on the roll when using the barcode ? Have you tried to run it overnight?? Thanks so much!!

 

[ProPDF]

Are you running it with the takeup reel option?? Is there a way to make the summa do a cut sheet in between jobs on the roll when using the barcode ? Have you tried to run it overnight?? Thanks so much!!

We have not used the take-up but have considered it. We are just considering getting a larger summa so we have held off. Yes it will sheet cut after each job in Caldera. We just built a small wood collector that looks like a ramp and glued a smooth piece of sheet metal to the top and let them slide down once cut and stack. It's not perfect and can look a little messy if they don't slide right but I would much rather take 10-15 minutes to re-stack jobs in the am then sit by the computer click cut...wait..click cut..wait...ect. It looks like a small kids skate board ramp with sheet metal on the surface. Yes we run it overnight...is it perfect? No sometimes we show up and it skewed and jammed up but it's not summa's fault it the material. Some materials track and cut great others don't. The 93lb kraft liners are the best we noticed. Also the cool thing about the barcode option is no more worrying about the order of your cut and print jobs. If it has a barcode you can load the print in the cutter....and when it scans the barcode it will find the job no matter where it is in the que. So you can print the roll in order...and just cut as needed out of order. We did add more pinch rollers...which are crazy expensive.... (summa you can drop the price on those!) The blade, the speed, cutter strip are all very very crucial. I think people read rave reviews about summa's and expect them to be a saving grace...they are but you have to dial them in period!

If any of you are doing crazy amounts of cutting and want to spend some money on keeping everything straight in terms of registration optiscout offers a camera system for even better recognition with summa's. The cutters are capable of doing flatbed type of cutting and are a much cheaper option than a flatbed. Here is the link.

https://www.optiscout.com/main.dml?sprache=eng click on roll cutter addition and there is a video on youtube....the optiscout setup looks great but we have not had the need for it as summa's setup is working great for us.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0QnOtSlWaI

It basically prints more crop marks and scans them super quick!

 

[dan1942]

That optiscut looks pretty good I am going to look into this too! I am going to try the sheet cut method between barcodes (as soon as I can find that option in Onyx) before I pick up the take up system.
Thanks for the help and great advice!
Dan

 

[CarNate69]

No we did not go the paneling option route. We dropped flexi and the pc platform all together and went with a imac and caldera. So much better! We chose caldera after doing a demo cause caldera (and your onyx) offer the option to use barcodes with summa on each job via summa postnet barcode functions. We didn't find a ton of info on the barcode function but it's amazing compared to what we were doing. We ended up making the jobs smaller and send them to caldera. Once the summa barcode option is selected in the rip it adds barcodes and registration marks automatically. After printed and laminated (if you laminate the roll) load the media into the summa. Find the first registration mark on the first job and then away it goes on the entire roll if you desire for truely automated cutting. No more clicking cut per job and lining up the first registration mark of each job, just the first job and first registration mark. Once setup it can basically cut overnight and then have them stacked in the a.m. This function was worth it's weight in gold for us. Onxy has this option too. So if you must use the vinyl your using try making the jobs shorter if possible with barcodes turned on. The issue we had like others mentioned was slipping of the liner and the laminate surface was not perfectly smooth. Also you can run onyx on your imac, go get a windows 7 or 8 professional original cd. Go to applications in the mac and click bootcamp. It will run you through the install and command r on bootup (I believe) turns the whole mac into a fully functioning pc. The monitors on the imac's are great for viewing color too vs other monitors we looked at. The VMware and other softwares that claim to run windows never worked for us, always crashed. We were already designing in illustrator on macs due to the screens and speed out of the box on a mac so it was a smooth transition after a month of dialing it all in. Your summa and mutoh kona cutters are the only ones we know of that work with caldera and onyx barcodes. Flexi does not...nor do they seem to show interest in adding the postnet barcode option for those reading and wondering about flexi.... another reason we dropped flexi was they have known issues exporting files with transparencies to illustrator...forcing us to rebuild a ton of files. They don't like to tell people this in fact they told us this was fixed in the cloud but we did the cloud demo and none of our flexi 10 files with transparencies would convert or work outside of flexi 10 correctly. The cutting can be frustrating and we had moments where we were ready to catch the summa on fire but it's all a learning process wasting a lot of money....consider it paid tuition lol.v

Flexi Cloud does bar codes with Summa and links to Summas barcode server software, please check your info before posting so others can have accurate info.

 

[ProPDF]

Flexi Cloud does bar codes with Summa and links to Summas barcode server software, please check your info before posting so others can have accurate info.

im not calling flexi for an up to date before I make a post on signs101 to see if anything we experienced has changed in the past with flexi cloud. We paid for the 30 day demo of cloud and not one soul there really had any idea what we were speaking about in regards to the post net barcodes at that time. Nice to see they added it though if you got it working.

 

[AF]

Need more info to understand the problem. Did you use a bleed? How big of a job or did you print just one decal? Is your Summa fully calibrated and cleaned? How do you laminate? Same problem if you don't laminate?

Straightness off a latex changes along the length of the print. The first few feet will have different distortion than the rest of the print. You also have to enter the correct positive or negative value in the rip to get correct results.

Of all the rips I have tested with the Latex and Summa, Onyx was the only one with cutting alignment problems. Supposedly a recent patch fixed the issue but the only way to know for certain would be to run the same job through a different rip and compare. A workaround is to add the Summa cut marks in AI but you lose barcode workflow.

To get more accurate straightness measurements, print the straightness plot between a couple of jobs. Don't cut the first job(s) off and don't cut the straightness plot off. Print the whole thing and let it cool. Then measure the straightness. You should do the same for length also.

I suspect that you need a bigger bleed, need to verify your Onyx is patched, should slow down the feed rate on the Summa and should ensure the media is not hanging up on the Summa during cutting. Use paneling or break the job into smaller jobs regardless.