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Contour cutting prints from an L25500 on an XC540?

Desert_Signs

New Member
I found a smoking deal on a 42" L25500. Right now, I have a small 24" plotter (just for cut vinyl) and I run everything else (and cut it) on the Roland. I don't have a ton of room in the shop, even bringing in a 42" printer is going to be tight. I plan on using the HP for small stuff. Little decals, etc. What I don't want to have to do is buy a plotter just for it. Is it possible to print to the HP with the Roland cropmarks then cut on the Roland? I assume I can't do this with Versaworks, so I'm looking for a RIP that can do this.

Ideas?
 

FrankW

New Member
You can do it in Flexi and in Onyx. In Flexi both in the RIP and with the Option "Contour Cutting without RIP" to set registration marks in the editor itself to send the data to VersaWorks and doing contour cutting out of Flexi.

But you will not be happy with it. Because of the curing heat vinyls get a bowing effect, what means the front part of the print will form a bow. This will lead to high accuracy on both sides of the contour jobs, but a deviation of millimeters in the middle. The only solution to compensate that is to make small jobs, not one job which span the whole printing width, or buying a Summa Cutting Plotter with OPOS X, because OPOS X can compensate that bowing effect.
 

Typestries

New Member
You can definitely do this. You could even use versa works. But, you won't get the advanced error correction you would with a summa or graphic. That being said, we did just what you want to do for years in a high volume environment without any issues, once we figured out what worked the best.

We were pioneers of print and cut. 15 years ago we were cutting prints off of our arizona 180s solvent dinosaurs on our roland aqueous print/cut devices. We took the crop marks that the roland cj's printed, and recreated them in illustrator. Set them manually in a rectangle around the graphic, put a cut path and art inside the rectangle and printed the job. We then loaded it in our roland and sent the job to roland color choice (predecessor to versa works) and chose cut only so that the machine thought it was getting a print it had just printed that was removed for lamination then reloaded.

Now we cut on graphtec plotters with real recognition and error correction, but we actually held on to one of the rolands until just last year for a backup and it worked just fine in concert with our latex printers. Not perfect like the graphics, but it sure worked and no reason why for your application it's not al least worth trying before spending big coin on a better plotter.

Yes, there are some heat deformation issues with latex, particularly with the el cheapo vinyls, but for oracal 3651 this system will work just fine for you.
 
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