Print/cut thick material - how long is too long?

[DesireeM]

I need to print 1000 decals for a customer and I ran into a fairly expensive issue/mistake. I did an initial print/lam/cut test of 33 decals at once (approx 53" x 24") and it worked fine.

I then printed 4 sets of 210 of these decals and laminated them and then put them back in to cut them and.....it didn't work. The machine had an extremely hard time just finding the crop marks and then after about 10 tries it finally read all the marks and started cutting but it was off by 1/2 an inch!

I've cut large amounts of decals before and usually I try to keep the length of the sheet below 8ft to keep the cuts accurate within 1/16th inch. It has worked fairly well for me.

So I've concluded that it must be due to the thickness of these decals and the length I tried to cut(approx 8 ft).

They are being printed on reflective vinyl and then lamnated with a 6mil pebbled polycarbonate. That part is not negotiable.

I am doing two cut passes at full pressure in order to get through.

Does anyone have experience with contour-cutting decals this thick? Should I keep the sheet sections to a certain length? If so, what would you suggest?

 

[mpn]

I stay at 4' or less

 

[DesireeM]

I stay at 4' or less

For all print/cuts or just really thick ones?

 

[d fleming]

All

 

[mpn]

Just what you're asking about. I try not to go over 4' on thick materials in general, and correct me if I'm wrong but the poly laminate you're using is probably extra tough to deal with. Maybe the pebble finish is confusing your machine?

 

[DesireeM]

Just what you're asking about. I try not to go over 4' on thick materials in general, and correct me if I'm wrong but the poly laminate you're using is probably extra tough to deal with. Maybe the pebble finish is confusing your machine?

I'm not sure if it's an issue with the pebbled finish because I ran a test initially on a 2' sheet and it read the marks just fine.

 

[d fleming]

I'm not sure if it's an issue with the pebbled finish because I ran a test initially on a 2' sheet and it read the marks just fine.

You can print crops on clear and hand place over existing to help, or a sharp point black sharpie. Or even cut them in black vinyl.

 

[DesireeM]

You can print crops on clear and hand place over existing to help, or a sharp point black sharpie. Or even cut them in black vinyl.

It's worth a shot on the sheets that are going to be trashed anyways. Nothing to lose there.
Thanks for the tip.

 

[GAC05]

Lots of little ways to attack this.
Once in while (ok, more than once in a while) in a rush I'll print out a sheet to be contour cut and then realize it might be too long to risk cutting in one go.
Instead of trashing the printed & laminated panel I'll open up the print file and break the ganged decals down into 2 layers.
Set the potter to return to origin and then turn off extra layer. Cut one layer - turn it off and turn on the second - plotter re-registers the crop marks and cuts the last set.
Not as smart as setting them up right in the first place but beats tossing the print in the can and starting over.

wayne k
guam usa

 

[d fleming]

I just today did some fine detail label printing on my pigment printer (epson 10600) that my seiko just can't do crisp because of small size of text and then printed the contour cut and crops on laminate on the seiko. Lined up laminate and print and now have crops that will read and cut. Signlab geeks couldn't make the epson print/cut even though they said they could so this is my workaround. Little more labor intensive than I like but it got the job done nice and clean.