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Who remembers the Gerber 4b?

John Miller

John Miller

New Member
Hi all,
I have a recurring order for 5-10k black intermediate vinyl discs 1/2" and 1.5" diameter. My friction feed plotter is fine for typical vinyl cutting but when cutting thousands of discs it wanders a bit.
I bought a 4b with 15" and 30" plotters off ebay. They came with a PCX-5D box. Can anyone explain how to attach the plotters to my system? My sign software has the Gerber drivers, I just can't seem to get my software to recognize the plotters. I've forgotten how to set it up.
 
Attila Nagy

Attila Nagy

New Member
Seriously, I love old machines, repair cutters for 30 years, I just have some HS15 here as well, but that typewriter is before computers. I would not go back that far.
I cannot remember what interface it has. share some Pic.s I may could help to figure out.
 
kcollinsdesign

kcollinsdesign

Old member
I had a couple of those. I had a custom board built that I placed into a font slot and connected to the power supply (yes, it took a bit of electrical engineering and a soldering iron). You cannot simply plug into one of those things. There might be some older interface boards floating around that would work, but I don't think I would mess with it. If you do, make sure you discharge the caps before you start probing around!
 
gabagoo

gabagoo

New Member
If your just cutting a circle why not just use the 4b by itself? I remember those days...set up 3 lines of copy with the little red LED readout, start it, go out get a coffee, drink it come back and it was almost finished!!! lol
 
John Miller

John Miller

New Member
gabagoo said:
If your just cutting a circle why not just use the 4b by itself? I remember those days...set up 3 lines of copy with the little red LED readout, start it, go out get a coffee, drink it come back and it was almost finished!!! lol
Click to expand...
I thought of that but wouldn't I have to key in 8,000 dots?
 
P

ProSignTN

New Member
Back in the day there was an 'urban legend', if you will, about a 4b. Seems thieves robbed a sign shop for the tools and unable to pawn it, threw a 4b out on the side of the road. The next spring when the road department came though to mow, they discovered this 4b, weathered for a whole winter in a ditch. They found an old signman, whose arthritis had crippled his brush hand, to take it in and get it up and running. Legend has it, the 4b still cuts rubber mask for tombstones til this day.
 
B

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
John Miller said:
I bought a 4b with 15" and 30" plotters off ebay. They came with a PCX-5D box. Can anyone explain how to attach the plotters to my system? My sign software has the Gerber drivers, I just can't seem to get my software to recognize the plotters. I've forgotten how to set it up.
Click to expand...

We had a Gerber SignMaker 4B and a larger Gerber plotter 20 some-odd years ago when I first started at my work place. My memory is pretty foggy on this, but we had the 4B connected to a Windows PC by a kind of "bridge" device. I think it connected to the PC via a Serial port, but I think it was a 25-pin port rather than the traditional 9-pin port. Back then we had all kinds of LPT port and Serial port adapters.

For anyone not familiar with the SignMaker 4B, it was designed as a stand-alone device. It had its own keyboard. The unit also had plug-in cartridges to load different typefaces. However it did not have a monitor. If someone knew all the proper codes and didn't make any errant typos he could manually design and cut graphics on the 4B without having a computer attached to it. We didn't mess with that approach. Our 4B basically ran as a "dumb" vinyl cutter, driven by CASmate.

The 4B worked pretty well, although it was pretty slow. The machine required sprocket fed vinyl -15" vinyl rolls with holes on the edges. It was easy to end up with a lot of waste. We ended up selling the 4B to a monument company. The 4B could be set with really heavy cutting force, which was great for sandblast stencil maskant. We've gone through Allen DataGraph and Graphtec plotters since then.
 
N

netsol

Active Member
Atilla, the 4b can have a lettering machine kit (LMK) installed in one of the font slots.
It can connect to a db9 serial port.
You will find LMK in the Gerber choices in flexisign, for instance
I bought my first one in 1996. It sits in my office, I still use it a few times a month. (It has sentimental value)
Typewriter? The hell you say! Mine still works perfectly
 
James Burke

James Burke

Being a grandpa is more fun than working
I briefly used a friend's 4B with an LMK and it was awesome. Amazingly, even at nearly 40 years of age, they still have a place today (where most computer equipment over a couple of years old is outdated).

The 4B eventually morphed into the HS/GS models, and some parts are even interchangeable. I use a GS exclusively for cutting monument stencil.


JB
 
vondegroot

vondegroot

bad design kills
ProSignTN said:
Back in the day there was an 'urban legend', if you will, about a 4b. Seems thieves robbed a sign shop for the tools and unable to pawn it, threw a 4b out on the side of the road. The next spring when the road department came though to mow, they discovered this 4b, weathered for a whole winter in a ditch. They found an old signman, whose arthritis had crippled his brush hand, to take it in and get it up and running. Legend has it, the 4b still cuts rubber mask for tombstones til this day.
Click to expand...
Lol, this is rad... one of my first design jobs I had was at a sign shop, just as I started my 3 year GD course at Fanshawe College. It was mostly cutting and weeding rubber mask for sandblasting wooden signs (farm owners were the main clients)

The woman who owned the sign shop called it "butter", and I can remember we had to have this STACK of weights on the Gerber's knife, and then some.

And then there was the fonts thing, Windows 95/98, and to top things off, the SignLab dongle would eff up!
Good times!
 
N

netsol

Active Member
actually, atilla, it is a 4, not a 4 b. note the weights that are stacked and the counter balance arm

and here is the cable from the LMK
 

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mjames

mjames

New Member
John Miller said:
Hi all,
I have a recurring order for 5-10k black intermediate vinyl discs 1/2" and 1.5" diameter. My friction feed plotter is fine for typical vinyl cutting but when cutting thousands of discs it wanders a bit.
I bought a 4b with 15" and 30" plotters off ebay. They came with a PCX-5D box. Can anyone explain how to attach the plotters to my system? My sign software has the Gerber drivers, I just can't seem to get my software to recognize the plotters. I've forgotten how to set it up.
Click to expand...
It would be best to use Gerber Omega software to drive the 15" or 30" Gerber plotters. I still have those plotters. They are very accurate.
 
G

gsignmaker

New Member
Bobby H said:
We had a Gerber SignMaker 4B and a larger Gerber plotter 20 some-odd years ago when I first started at my work place. My memory is pretty foggy on this, but we had the 4B connected to a Windows PC by a kind of "bridge" device. I think it connected to the PC via a Serial port, but I think it was a 25-pin port rather than the traditional 9-pin port. Back then we had all kinds of LPT port and Serial port adapters.

For anyone not familiar with the SignMaker 4B, it was designed as a stand-alone device. It had its own keyboard. The unit also had plug-in cartridges to load different typefaces. However it did not have a monitor. If someone knew all the proper codes and didn't make any errant typos he could manually design and cut graphics on the 4B without having a computer attached to it. We didn't mess with that approach. Our 4B basically ran as a "dumb" vinyl cutter, driven by CASmate.

The 4B worked pretty well, although it was pretty slow. The machine required sprocket fed vinyl -15" vinyl rolls with holes on the edges. It was easy to end up with a lot of waste. We ended up selling the 4B to a monument company. The 4B could be set with really heavy cutting force, which was great for sandblast stencil maskant. We've gone through Allen DataGraph and Graphtec plotters since then.
Click to expand...
"Slow" was relative back then! It wasn't slow till the newer plotters and faster softer came out! lol
 
B

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Not only could the newer plotters cut faster, they could cut smaller details too without chewing up the vinyl. I remember around the end of 1993 I made a vector re-creation of the "Jurassic Park" movie logo and cut it out of vinyl. It took what seemed like at least several minutes for the 4B cut the graphics. The next plotter we bought would cut vinyl much faster.

netsol said:
I bought my first one in 1996.
Click to expand...

That's about the time we sold our SignMaker 4B. We had a 36" wide Allen DataGraph plotter running by that time.

It wouldn't surprise to see an old 4B still running to this day. They were built pretty stout. Can't say the same for a lot of other electronics devices.
 
Chimuka

Chimuka

New Member
I have a GK1, which stands for Gerber Kill 1. This company certainly did not kill Gerber but is one of the first software driven systems. 30 fonts yippe!
A pre-runner for what ended up Summa through Houston Instruments.
 
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