Graphtec Tangetial emmulation

I believe Graphtec is tangetial . Mine is ( or so I was told) a CE3000Mk2. It has a motor that controls the blade.

 

tangental turns the blade instead of draging it arround the corners,
this works well in heavy materials but I dont know if it will help in the small letter department, I have a drag knife type and it will cut smaller than 1/4" with no problems, mine is a summa but I am shure that the graphtec will do this also
but if you are going to do small letters all the time I would go to an edge, or printer where you can print the letters with a background and skip the weeding, weeding those small letters are a pain, //chopper

 

I have had a Roland PNC 1000 since the mid 80's and a Roland GX24. The GX24 is supposed to be similar to the Mk2. Not so. I sold the GX24. I love my Graphtec and it cuts small letters great. The only time I had a problem was my fault. I replaced blade ( CleanCut blades good!) and had the spring set in wrong. Sooooo yes it cut small letters very good. I don't cut any letters under 3/8 to 1/2 if I absolutely have to.

 

I just wanted to add that I think it wold be better to have your machine set right than have tangental, on small letters depth, overcut, speed, etc. make a big diffrence on how the letters weed out and come off the release liner,
good luck // chopper

 

I have a Graphtec and I have used the tangential to cut thick material that I was having problems with. I have not used it to cut small items, I use my Edge to do those and do not weed.

 

Tangential control will benefit you most if you're cutting thick materials.

Any Graphtec from 4100 series and up; the CE 1000's and up can cut 1/16th characters (upper case, no serifs)...that's 0.062", and the lower case is .7 of that. Sometimes you can weed off the liner, sometimes you need to weed off the application, but the cut is perfect in any case. You don't need Tangential control to do this.

howard

 

craigco I have a summa s75 I really love this machine, what size letters do you need to cut?//chopper

 

Back in days of yore all plotters were tangential cutting toolheads. Instead of a blade tip being offset so that it can swivel as it makes a turn, the tool head is rotated by a motor and has no offset. It is theoretically the most accurate way to cut because the tip of the blade is always following the exact vector toolpath.

In actual practice, it is slower because the tool is lifted, turned and dropped back at every corner. Also an issue is some corners not being cut cleanly for reasons I won't go into. All Gerber plotters from the beginning in 1982 through the HS series were tangential. Tangential toolheads are also more expensive to build.

Early swivel blade systems were fairly unsophisticated adaptations used with plotters designed for pen drawings. They were inferior to tangential cutters and tainted the reputation of the technology. Today's swivel knife systems deliver exceptional accuracy and quality. They are faster, quieter and less expensive.

As an interesting piece of history, and having ordered a copy of Gerber's original patent on their vinyl cutting plotter, I can tell you that their original design used a hot tip to accomplish the cutting of vinyl. The first machine they actually brought to market though was a tangential cutting version.

The concept of the hot tip was later brought to market by a now defunct company named TechnoArts. They fitted what looked like a soldering gun to an Ioline plotter and did quite well for some time. It literally burned through the vinyl to accomplish cutting. They went out of business around 1990 or so, owing a lot of people money and ran their sign supply business after that known as Performance Sign Products. The manager of PSP, a nice young man, left them shortly after that and resurfaced as the owner of the old Airmark Sign Supply which went on to become Summa USA.

:Sleeping: :Sleeping: :Sleeping:

 

There's a reason to use Tangential Emmulation...that reason is NOt to cut tiny characters, although sometimes it's useful for that. You use tangential control to cut thick materials, typically on the order of .035" or so, where you just can't physically pull a swivel knife through an acute angle or around a small radius. But you don't have to...that's the joy of tangential...and no, you don't need a motor to turn the blade.
For cutting small characters, and by small I mean 1/16th or less, you need a Graphtec swivel knife system....period.
howard

 

Great info here.

 

I recently did some very small letters with my CE5000-60. The trick for me was to slooow down the speed.

 

i use Tangential Emmulation mode on reflective with better results than without it.