Help with perf cutting on mimaki cjv 150-75

[Paultheprinter]

Does anyone have a mimaki cjv150-75 or similar model.
Basically I print and perform cut over 500 1.5” square stickers yesterday perfectly with no problems.
Then today I had to print and perf cut 100 6” x 2.5” stickers which I arranged portrait in the job setup in rasterlink. I use a digital print vinyl that is 760mm in width. I use 2 pinch rollers 1 on each end of the vinyl as I find that if I use 3, and place one in the middle, any stickers In the middle I cannot sell to customer as it leaves a faint roller mark on it even when the pinch roller is set to low. So it prints fine, then reads crop marks and then starts to cut, it cuts from the left first and cuts the first sticker the when it goes to cut the second sticker to the right of it, the vinyl buckles up. Can somebody explain if I am making a rookie mistake somewhere or if there needs to be a particular distance the outer punch rollers need to be from the cut lines. Or a particular amount of leading edge vinyl to the front of the printer. I cannot seem to find any tutorials anywhere, so any help or advice will be extremely appreciated!!
Cheers,

Paul

 

[myront]

Perf cut? You mean kiss-cut or shape cut? Or "Half cut" or punch out?
Distance between decals?
We don't get roller marks using the low setting.

 

[Saturn]

For cutting all the way through a material I don't feel like you can get good, consistent results from a roll cutter without using as many available pinch rollers as possible. My 30" plotter came with only the two outside ones and when it came to cutting all the way through, the material would just buckle like yours is. Once I added more pinch rollers things were solved. I don't get marks or impressions that typically interfere with the job quality.

 

[Paultheprinter]

Perf cut? You mean kiss-cut or shape cut? Or "Half cut" or punch out?
Distance between decals?
We don't get roller marks using the low setting.

Hi there i generally leave 5mm distance between decals. I call it a perfect cut so it’s where it cuts all the way through but leaves little 2mm tabs attached so you can lunch it out at end. I don’t think the distance would make a difference between decals as it buckles on the 1st decal cut before it’s even hit the to the second. I did wonder if because it’s printing a dark black if that might temporarily affect the strength of the vinyl until it dries? I tend to print and cut Immediately without leaving ink to dry 100% as it never caused me any problems in the past. Do you have the same machine? How many pinch rollers would you use normally on a media that’s 760mm wise when printing and cutting lunch out stickers? I have attached a photo to show the relation of the lunch roller and how close it is to artwork and cutline.

Paul

 

[Paultheprinter]

Would I be right in thinking that for small stickers I could get away with just 2 pinch rollers, but for 6 inch stickers you would need 3 pinch rollers? I always have my outer pinch rollers set to high and the inner to low, is that correct? Should I leave the artwork to dry for a while before cutting it? Would that eliminate pinch roller marks across the artwork!
Cheers Paul

ps: is there any online videos that show you how to use the mimaki for all aspects?

 

[myront]

Hi there i generally leave 5mm distance between decals....
Paul

5mm is kind of tight. I usually run our decals about 1/4" apart. Especially if punch cutting.
Mimaki CG-160FXII CorelDraw X7 w/FineCut 8 plug-in
I set it all up within corel (cut layer, cut lines, reg marks, step and repeat etc.) whole lot easier that way.
In some cases the pinch rollers can be placed in such a way that they run between the decals instead of on them. Or if the cut has square corners, as in your case here, I'll do two cuts.
1 regular then an outer punch cut and pull off the difference after punching them out. makes for cleaning corner cuts.

 

[myront]

Would I be right in thinking that for small stickers I could get away with just 2 pinch rollers....

These decals are laminated I hope.
Might try slowing the speed down too. Too much "jerking" back and forth can cause problems too.

 

[myront]

What's going on here?

 

[myront]

With these type of reg marks you could get the same amount of decals and still allow more distance between.

 

[Paultheprinter]

These decals are laminated I hope.
Might try slowing the speed down too. Too much "jerking" back and forth can cause problems too.

No these decals aren’t laminated the customer didn’t want them laminated.
I did try slowing the cutting speed down to 5 but it still did it. I am wondering if the size of the sticker being cut 6” meant there was more “flex” in the vinyl, as opposed to the small 1” stickers? That artwork alignment to you circled is just where one of the designs was slightly larger than the others. I’m sure I tried thy is either registration marks when I first got the printer but the supplier I got the printer from said I would have problems with the machine registering them which I did, hence why I use the crop marks I have in there. What about the distance between the artwork and cut line and the outer pinch roller, is that enough of a gap, will attach a close up pic. My problem is I don’t know how far from the pinch roller the artwork will be until it start to print, is there a way of checking before it start to print? And pinch roller 2 as you’ll see won’t go any further across to the left, unless i put pinch roller 2 in the middle and use pinch roller 3 as the outer which means I could have it over to thy e left a bit more, but as I said before if I have a middle lunch roller on light it leaves a slight pinch roller tracking mark across the artwork. What’s your process for print and cut? I generally print and cut straight away, if I leave the ink to dry on vinyl for an hour before cutting would that eliminate the pinch roller tracking mark?

sorry for all the questions lol,
Paul

 

[myront]

We only use a Mimaki plotter. We use an HP for printing. And EVERYTHING gets laminated unless for 1-5 days use.
- I would never recommend only 3 of 4 pinch rollers. Use all 4 with the 2 outermost set to high or tight grip and the 2 inner ones to low grip. You can use two on smaller runs but set them both at the highest grip.
- I wouldn't do anything less than 7mm between each decal.
- You only need about 13mm distance between reg marks and print.
- We've never had any problem with the other type of reg marks. Using that type will allow more decals per row whereby saving material.

 

[Paultheprinter]

Hey Myront thanks for giving me a contact number, I am in the UK so when would be the best time to give you a call?
In the meantime I will try the other registration marks again too in the rasterlink just to see out of curiosity how much more decals I could fit in.

 

[Paultheprinter]

Also i tried the different crop marks in Raster but wasn’t getting any extra decals in the job frame??
I have attached a pic of a job with registration marks which will give me 7 stickers across with a 5mm gap all round between each one, and the same without registration marks. If I take registration marks off I can get 8 stickers across which would Give me an extra 12 stickers per metre. BUT how accurate would the Mimaki be at cutting 1 metre of stickers without crop marks?? Also without the crop marks the outside pinch rollers would probably be extremely close if not ON the artwork and obviously be rolling over where it will have CUT the decals which I am assuming would be asking for trouble?? Do I just have to accept that I can only cut 7decals across safely and that’s just how it is?

 

[Paultheprinter]

Q

 

[iPrintStuff]

Off topic here Paul but what rasterlink are you using? We got our 5 upgraded to 6 for free and it completely eliminated the need for the finecut plugin and saved LOADS of time.

We now use onyx BUT it means you can just load the job 1 up, tell rasterlink how many copies and it steps it up and adds crop marks etc for you. Should make things a lot quicker for you.

 

[myront]

This would be a typical setup for me.

 

[Paultheprinter]

This would be a typical setup for me.
View attachment 146516

And with the limitations of where you can put the pinch rollers, if the punch roller falls over the artwork, would that be ok given that it might roll over the cut decal and potentially buckle that decal, and then if that decal come out it will roll in the empty gap and cause a problem? Also print with the heaters on to dry the ink, would you then turn the heaters off for cutting? And how do I make sure the pinch rollers don’t leave any track marks on the artwork even when they are set to low? Or does that that have a lot to depend on the print media, drying times etc?
Do you cut straight after printing or do you take off machine and leave to dry first?

 

[myront]

And with the limitations of where you can put the pinch rollers, if the punch roller falls over the artwork, would that be ok given that it might roll over the cut decal and potentially buckle that decal, and then if that decal come out it will roll in the empty gap and cause a problem? Also print with the heaters on to dry the ink, would you then turn the heaters off for cutting? And how do I make sure the pinch rollers don’t leave any track marks on the artwork even when they are set to low? Or does that that have a lot to depend on the print media, drying times etc?
Do you cut straight after printing or do you take off machine and leave to dry first?

Very rare occasion you can get by with the outermost pinch rollers falling outside the substrate to get maximum cut width. As long as you have the other two holding somewhere.
We don't have a print AND plot Mimaki. Also anything that requires machine cut will be laminated and I believe that helps a lot with not getting track marks. That means removing from the latex printer then laminate, then plot. If, by chance, we printed for temp use and not laminated, we'd probably stick to just the outer pinch rollers.