Long contour cuts?

[Signed Out]

i have an xj540 which is a print only soljet and a gx500 plotter. it works pretty good most of the time for print and cut, doesn't matter if lamed or not. just when i do a job that is over 5' in length it is hit or miss on cut alignment. any thoughts on how to correct this. by the way i love having seperate printer and cutter, allows me to do more jobs at the same time, but do people have less trouble with a print/cut machine?

 

[Flame]

Simply not possible. No matter what equipment you use....unless you have a sprocket plotter, you're just not going to get 100% accurate cuts. Hit and miss.

 

[Signed Out]

so when i say have to letter a van or truck should i be doing it in sections to avoid this? jsut seems like a lot of extra work.

 

[J Hill Designs]

build in bleeds or yeah shorten your runs

 

[Mosh]

Design with 1/8" of wiggle room on 8'-10' long prints.

 

[Signed Out]

i do build in bleeds but if you have a black letter with white outline then bleeds don't work...i dont think. Also is there any way to change your cut paths after you have printed with reg. marks. or would you have to reprint?

 

[Signed Out]

Mosh can you elaborate on building in 1/8 of wiggle room?

 

[Signed Out]

Design with 1/8" of wiggle room on 8'-10' long prints.

can you elaborate please?

 

[J Hill Designs]

I believe by wiggle room he means bleed...

 

[MikePro]

aye, i have the same issue as well, and bleeding the graphic made it workable.
what baffles me is how, every now and then, i'm off by an inch or so no matter how square I think i've lined up my graphic to the plotter! Seems like such a waste of material to be tiling every 3-6' but it is what it is I guess

 

[Sticky Signs]

anything over 5' is an issue on my machine. I always add a ton of bleed, turn off the heat and slow the machine down for cutting. takes a little longer but it's still faster than reprinting.

 

[DGDesigns]

I install every pinch roller when I print. I pull slack in the material prior to printing to take the stress off of the material when it feeds for printing. Then after i laminate i run the cutter real slow (10) and I leave the pinch rollers in the same position. i also try to keep the outer pinch rollers away from the edge of the material. I ran an 11' boat graphic with a lot of direction changes and contour cuts and had very little "walk". But I do agree with the rest of the guys...maybe I just got plain lucky.

 

[dhawkes]

Long contour cuts

Hello all,

I caught up with our Printer Product Manager. This is a common problem. There is no solution for single objects over that length (e.g. - pinstripes), but the Custom Cut function in VersaWorks does help for cut accuracy by breaking the job into sections without the need for manual tiling.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Dave Hawkes
Group Product Manager
Roland DGA