• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

Question Blade replacement tips/tricks - frustrated

TomK

New Member
Hey All,

Have a Summa S2T that I absolutely love, except for when the time comes to change the blade in it. I have marks on the holder and rod to line them back up and use same number of rotations in and out to try and get it back to where it was...and for the most part this works fine.

The down force for normal cutting is quick and easy to dial in and for the most part it is a +/- 5 setting to get it back where it needs to be. However...

My issue is with the Flex/perf cut settings. I have to readjust the flex cut settings drastically up or down after every blade change, and it is time consuming and eats a bunch of material since I have to do this obviously for each material I run through the plotter.

For example, fresh blade change last weekend - and I had to increase the flex cut settings by 45 and 25 for one material I use, and decrease em for another material I use.

Makes absolutely no sense to me and is getting quite frustrating. I wish Graphtec and Summa could figure out a way to innovate this process a bit, like just drop in a cartridge and it positions it back where it was or something like that.

Any suggestions from the pro's on a good process for changing your blades or is it just a fact of life to have to dial in each materials settings again after each blade change?

Also, I tried Clean Cut blades in my Summa, that was a big failure. They work fine in my Graphtec, but not so well in the Summa. I compared the size of the blades to the OEM Summa, and the CC was a bit shorter so not sure if that had anything to do with it or not. The CC blades also left my vinyl contour cuts feeling a bit rough when I ran my hands over the cuts compared to the Summa blade. This was with the 36 degree blade, since that is all I use in the Summa.
 

ikarasu

Active Member
There's a certain way to set the blade. You take a piece of vinyl preferably scrap, put it on the table.. extend the blade and push down on it against the vinyl making a line. Once it only cuts through the vinyl and a bit into the backing paper, it should be fine.

For perf cutting... At least on the graphtec, you fold the vinyl and repeat the process until the blade is it enough to cut through one layer, and barely touch the second..l

I do all my test cuts on scrap vinyl, or between registration marks... Or I find a spot where there's a huge weeded piece and do it there. Only takes a 1 inch by 1 inch square to test.


How often do you change blades? I cut maybe 10 signs a day on our graphtec, and our originally blade has lasted about 2 years. The only blade we end up changing a lot is our thick diamond grade blades. Even our perf cutting blade has lasted hundreds of thousands of decals. So even if you change it yearly... And you waste $10-30 of material, it's not that bad. Annoying yes, but not TOO bad.


I've never tried these, but it sounds like what you'd like

MSK500V-Smart Knife-.5mm vinyl upto 450micron-Roland,Mimaki,Mutoh,Gerber.

No idea how good / bad it works though.
 
Top