Can't find crop marks??

[SIGNTIME]

Trying to do a print/cut job but our plotter can't find the back crop marks. Printer is xj540, plotter is gx500 and we are using versaworks. This is for a garbage truck, both sides of the truck are identical and are the same file. The first side cut fine, load the other side in the plotter and it can't find the back crop marks. The detector goes pretty close to the crop mark, looks like it should detect it but it doesn't. There is plenty of media behind the marks to not trip the sensor, we also covered teh sensor just to be sure. The only problem we can see here is that when we have the media in there perfectly square, it seems that the crop marks aren't square to the media, almost as if it printed crooked... We tried loading the media in so that the crop marks are square to the plotter and that doesn't work either. This is weird because everything for this truck printed at the same time on the same roll and we are only having trouble with this panel.

Is it possible to manually detect the crop marks on a job like this? I've read through the manual and it seems that if we measure the vertical and horizontal distance between the crop marks that we can enter that information on the plotter. Will this work? The file was set up to print/cut through versaworks, so we didn't draw in the crop marks, versaworks put the circles in there.

Has anybody had an experience like this before? Any ideas as to why the plotter can't find the crop marks even though it worked fine for the other side that was the same file? This has happened to us once before when we were printing a couple thousand static clings. We print/cut the same file something like 20 times and everything worked fine except 1 sheet we could never get the plotter to detect. We ended up reprinting that one and it worked fine.

 

[MR. Graphics]

I dont know if anything i mention will help. i have a mimaki cg160. the only time it wouldnt find the marks, was when the vinyl didnt line up correctly or if the mark was outside one of the pinch rollers.

 

[kanini]

Sometimes it can help to put a piece of matte lam over the crop marks (if you have a high-gloss media). Worth a shot if you have tried Everything else... Other than that you should be able to manually align the crop marks but how it's done on the cutter you have I'm a bit unsure of. Hope you get it solved!

 

[SIGNTIME]

It wasn't an alignment issue, and we tried the matte lam trick to no avail. So we tried to find the crop marks manually. It would only allow an input of 63" for the vertical distance of the crop marks... the print was 110". So that didn't work, or at least we didn't want to spend the time trying to make it work at that point.

We ended up opening the file in cut studio (illustrator plug-in) and cut the print as if it were a cut vinyl job. To align the print to the plotter and cut studio, we jogged the plotter around to different points on the print, taking measurments, then cutting small registration shapes outside the good part of the print. We think we got it spot on because when we cut it, the front cut perfect, but as it traveled to the back it started cutting inside of where it should have, as if the print printed longer than it was supposed to. It wasn't a total loss as only a small part of this was actually printed, most of it was white except one line of copy was black with a white outline, that part we had to reprint.

So it seems that somehow this troubled print seems to have printed about 1" longer than it should have. Anybody have any insight on this?

 

[HulkSmash]

try covering it in masking tape and redrawing the crop mark in black marker next time.

 

[SIGNTIME]

Since it seemed that the print was a bit long would we try to redraw the crop marks further back where we think they should be? Or redraw them right on top of the original ones?