Dimense printer - cutting

[Peter Brady]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone had any successful experience with cutting Dimense wallpaper material? We have a manual cutting table as well as a Summa flatbed cutter and we have not managed to cut the material perfectly so that the seams are not visible when installing the product.
If any of you have had better results, we'd love to learn from you.

Thank you,
Peter

 

[Pauly]

what's the issue with the cutting?

 

[Peter Brady]

There are multiple issues that we are experiencing:

All the blades / modules we have used (double edge, kiss, burr free, etc) rip through the material rather than giving it a clean cut. The material is a non-woven backing with a spongy print (the dimensional print), therefore the blades rip through it so that leads to the edges being extremely jagged, so when putting it up the seams are visible and not acceptable for the client.

The other issue is the tension in the material, when cutting samples or even along the edges, it pops up which doesn't allow for an uninterrupted cutting process, we need to tape it constantly to the vacuum area.

I have added a screenshot to show the type of cuts (the right side is cut with summa - the best cut that we could manage, the left one is with a keencut manual rotary blade. The keencut cut (pardon the pun) is a lot cleaner, but the seams are still visible when installing it up a wall.

I am hoping there is someone that has successfully managed to tame this material

 

[Pauly]

try the rotary blade for the summa.
otherwise, look at a fotoba XLD.

 

[White Haus]

That's definitely not ideal. What does Dimense say about best finishing methods?

 

[JBurton]

That's definitely not ideal. What does Dimense say about best finishing methods?

Likely something less than helpful, like temper your customer's expectations, or try to incorporate seems into the design...

 

[Mike Perth]

We trim flat non woven wallpaper on our 1612 using the kiss cut blade without issues. I’ve seen the “soft” Dimense prints and assumed you’d need to double cut at installation which is not ideal for DIY hanging. Have Dimense been able to offer any solution?

 

[Peter Brady]

We trim flat non woven wallpaper on our 1612 using the kiss cut blade without issues. I’ve seen the “soft” Dimense prints and assumed you’d need to double cut at installation which is not ideal for DIY hanging. Have Dimense been able to offer any solution?

We have no issues with all our other non woven materials, however thick they get, it's just the Dimense material that's iffy because of its sponginess and tension in the material (this is a separate issue other than the visible seams, if you want to cut samples, you have to reset the cutter at each sample, the minute it cut a rectangle, it immediately pops up due to tension).

Dimense didn't offer a solution per se, they mentioned double cutting, but we avoid doing that at all our installations as it leads to other issues far worse than visible seams. We've tried double cutting it on our cutting table just so we can rule this out and regardless of the blade of choice, edges are jagged. What worries me more is that at FESPA, the Dimense booth looked beautiful from afar, but when you inspected it closely all seams were completely visible. You might get away with that with the structural (non printed) material since it's probably going to be painted over, but not with the other ones.

Due to the material thickness, you cannot wash away the seams in the design, they'll be visible anywhere.

I was hoping someone here that's far more experienced than us found a way to cut it perfectly. I love the technology and what you can do with it, however not being able to cut it perfectly will lead to no sales

 

[Pauly]

...
Get a demo of a fotoba XLD.
It should do the job. it's the best XY Cutter on the market.
Can't afford it, there's a Flexa Mura.
Demo that.

Those are designed to cut sheets, posters, wallpaper...

 

[Peter Brady]

...
Get a demo of a fotoba XLD.
It should do the job. it's the best XY Cutter on the market.
Can't afford it, there's a Flexa Mura.
Demo that.

Those are designed to cut sheets, posters, wallpaper...

We've had a Flexa (the WP edition) and returned it, it was not able to cut straight (at least 1.5mm deviation at the top of the sheet vs. bottom of the sheet). The XLD was demoed to us, but the demo was lacking (probably because they never sold a XLD WP before). the XLA looks better to me, with its knives positioning automatically (eliminates user error in placing the blades), but as far as I can remember, they don't have a WP version of it either (this is used to always have the blades aligned to the cut line, Flexa does it with the take-up at the end, Fotoba with the knife line in the front).
Wallpaper is a different beast than any other thing if you want butt joints, you cannot go over 1mm deviation across the whole sheet, otherwise pattern doesn't match anymore).

 

[Mike Perth]

Hi Peter, this sounds frustrating, can the team at Summa help you? Send them some samples to try, maybe some whizkid Tech there could sort this out for you.

 

[Pauly]

We've had a Flexa (the WP edition) and returned it, it was not able to cut straight (at least 1.5mm deviation at the top of the sheet vs. bottom of the sheet). The XLD was demoed to us, but the demo was lacking (probably because they never sold a XLD WP before). the XLA looks better to me, with its knives positioning automatically (eliminates user error in placing the blades), but as far as I can remember, they don't have a WP version of it either (this is used to always have the blades aligned to the cut line, Flexa does it with the take-up at the end, Fotoba with the knife line in the front).
Wallpaper is a different beast than any other thing if you want butt joints, you cannot go over 1mm deviation across the whole sheet, otherwise pattern doesn't match anymore).

I have a fotoba XLD170HS.

On all the models the slitters move with the media, There's a sensor that reads and tracks a printed black line.
that's on all XLD models.
The fotoba uses rotary blades for all cutting where the mura only uses it on the crosscut i recall.

Not sure who you got the demo from, but Colex has then and maybe Canon american, i cant remember.

 

[Peter Brady]

I have a fotoba XLD170HS.

On all the models the slitters move with the media, There's a sensor that reads and tracks a printed black line.
that's on all XLD models.
The fotoba uses rotary blades for all cutting where the mura only uses it on the crosscut i recall.

Not sure who you got the demo from, but Colex has then and maybe Canon american, i cant remember.

Interesting, will look into that.
We are based in Europe and probably the Fotoba distributors here don't have a lot of experience on this side (I think they sold 1 unit to a production shop that handles posters mostly, so the type of cut, precision of cut, etc are not that important to them).
Update: we've also tried the rotary module from Summa, but it was worse than the tangential blades.

 

[Simonas]

Hi, my colleagues are using Fotoba XLD 170 WP for cutting Dimense prints and getting good results. There are some cutting tricks to get good quality in tile connection, please contact support@dimense.com with your question.