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Thanks to the Signs 101 archives, I fixed the problem. I found a thread from way back where a guy said his OPOS sensor got bumped and knocked one of its pegs out of the hole, which had it sitting crooked in the carriage. Sure enough, that's what happened to mine. I popped it back in place and we...

My Summa D75 has been a workhorse since I got it. It has been dead accurate and not had a single problem... until today. I cut one small job (printed 3M 680CR) with no issues. I loaded up the next job, about 4' long, and noticed something wasn't right about how it scanned the media, but I...

I was sent some stuff from Grimco that was supposedly made for the air release liners, but it was clear and I've never had good luck with that stuff. The thing that aggravated me the most was I actually took the time to load the transfer tape in the laminator to put it on this piece since it was...

I always roll it with the vinyl facing out, backer facing in. It seems to me that the issue is the low bond of the vinyl and masking to the air release liner. Big designs like this with a lot of negative space and a lot of liner exposed are when it really shows itself.

I go through a 10 yard roll of 680CR about every week. After trying a bunch of paper premasking I settled on Grimco's Briteline. It doesn't hold on to the air release liner all that great, but I haven't found anything that does. Today I ran some really big graphics (compared to what I normally...

I'm not in front of my computer, but I'm almost positive I'm using High-Logic also. It does fine for what I'm doing, I don't even know how to use half of the features haha.

That's a good one! That is what I designed the Allen Fire Department door graphic with.

Just curious, what font did you find?

The example I posted above is just a fill that I made, so the spins don't line up perfectly in each letter. But, most of the "printed" gold leaf I do is made to look just like hand laid gold with each spin placed individually on the letters. It's a process I've spent a few years dialing in, but...

This is my version of that font. I've been working on it off and on for a while, it is nowhere near finished and still needs to be cleaned up quite a bit, but you get the idea. I'm having to build a lot of fonts from scratch since I deal with so many fire trucks.

Co Copperplate condensed is close, but it still takes a lot of tweaking. You have to make all the serifs pointed instead of squared off, and many of the letters have some diffences. Pierce has a lot of awesome fonts, it's a shame they aren't available to purchase but I understand why they keep...

That's a proprietary Pierce font, it's not available for purchase.

It depends. Most engine turned gold should be encapsulated or edge sealed. If that's the case, you can either lay the gold first and then cut the black so that it extends slightly over the gold to seal it, or you can layer and laminate with a 1/8" laminate border around the gold. If you're...

NFPA sets guidelines for fire apparatus, but they are not law. Many departments choose to take an exception to NFPA guidelines for various reasons. There are still plenty of trucks being made with different color chevrons or none at all. However, since they are nationally accepted guidelines, if...

I don't know if this is an option, but if I was asked to do a black/white chevron I would try to use white reflective and then just plain black non reflective vinyl for the stripes. The whole idea behind chevrons is the alternating colors draw attention, so one big blob of white reflecting at...

I spent about 3 hours today designing a fire department patch. It had a couple cutout images imported from Corel Draw and a few effects but nothing too crazy. I was saving throughout the project, but when I clicked save for the last time Flexi crashed. I opened it back up and went to open the...

That's hand lettered, "fire truck bold" was possibly the manufacturers name for that style at the time. You can start with LHF Bandit and tweak the lowercase a little to get close to the G in that font, but other than that I haven't found any commercially available fonts that will work for that...

When did you have issues? They just recently made the product to where it doesn't need to be edge sealed, I think it's been less than a year ago when I was talking to them. I was a little skeptical, but they said the warranty was good on it and they have been great to deal with so far. I haven't...

No, I haven't found a fix yet. I bought the old Edge LE and I've been so busy I haven't had time to mess with the 2. It's looking like I'm going to have to send the boards to the Plotter Doctor in California, everything is pointing to it being an issue somewhere on a board.

I specialize in fire apparatus lettering, but I work on many other emergency vehicles and big trucks. There has been some great advice posted already, and I definitely agree with what was said as far as using only the best materials and taking your time to do good design work. Some may disagree...