huh? I thought this was general knowledge!
When you buy a blade holder from Graphtec... they include a vial of grease with it. You're supposed to put a drop in every once in awhile. We had 6 blade holders... the guy before me never did any kind of maintenance on them.... after cleaning and greasing them up, I fixed 2... the other 4 didn't cut good, and went into the garbage. Now it's part of our monthly maintenance.
The manual actually says if you dont have any of the grease they provide, any "Silicone grease" will do.
http://www.graphteccorp.com/support/appnotes/TNC_009_Making_Cutter_Last.pdf
You can buy a new blade holder for $10 on E-bay. they're cheap chinese ones... but I tend to use it 99% of the time when cutting normal vinyl as it does a way better job than our 5 year old blade holders.
A few other maintenance tips most people don't know about or do -
The cutting strips - On summa/graphtec theyre replaceable. They cost between $20-30... It's easy to change, and if you've never changed it... you'll notice a huge difference in cutting.
The grit rollers - Paper and glue tends to get stuck on them. It gives it uneven pressure and it'll tend to skew the media as it feeds. You take an old garbage bic pen, remove the pen from it.. move the media forward/backward when it's empty, and press the plastic pen against the grit rollers. It'll clean all the glue and paper away from the wheels
Wheel pressure - If your machine is skewing... its likely your pinch rollers need some maintenance. If one is looser than the other it'll skew - the left roller is generally always more loose than the furthest since it gets used 100% of the time. All you need to do to adjust the pressure is screw/unscrew the screw in the back - I bought a luggage scale from Amazon for $10. You put some vinyl under the wheel... attach it to the scale, and check how much pressure you need to pull the vinyl from the wheel. rinse and repeat on every wheel while adjusting the pressure - our 6 year old machine kept skewing, we noticed one wheel had almost zero pressure... tons of researching and reading maintenance manuals, and it looks like graphtec has a special tool to do this. It just looked like a luggage scale with a metal strip and a place for the wheel to sit into... i'm sure the amazon method isn't as accurate, but it worked for us!
Half the buttons on our graphtec seem to be broken and loose. The Fast button is the biggest culprit.. It tends to go underneath and gets stuck, and then the machine wont do anything until you notice and wiggle it back out. I believe it's 4 screws to open it up... We threw a bit of VHB tape underneath the buttons that were broken (It's very thin plastic...I'm talking a MM of plastic for each button, really stupid design), and it held the buttons up so they were firm and it was like a brand new machine. It lasted for about a year and a half, then we just repeated the process.
