Hartco sandblast resist doesn't want to play. Any suggestions?

[brian oliver]

Hi all,

I am attempting to cut Hartco S425-15 sandblast resist on my Signmaker IVb but the lettering is not cutting right. The font is Futura, roughly 1.2" tall. I am using a brand new 60* blade at 50% speed.

The trouble is that on most letters, the end of the cut does not match up to the start of the cut. For instance, on a dot of an "i", instead of a nice circle, it cuts something closer to a spiral-looking shape. That might give you an idea of what is happening with the letters: they get distorted. This particular product comes on a paper carrier and when I look closely at the holes that are used by the pin feed they seem to be getting elongated a bit, thereby throwing off the registration since the machine doesn't know where exactly the blade point is. I assume this happens as a result of the increased drag on the blade through the thick material.

I called Hartco about this with a suggestion that they might swich the carrier from paper to something more substantial to prevent this distortion of the holes but got little more than a sympathetic ear.

Has anyone else experienced this and if so how did you overcome it? I've already ruined about 3 yards of this high dollar material and would prefer to avoid having to cut a lot of small copy by hand.

Thanks.

Brian

 

[J Hill Designs]

are you unrolling the roll, so that the machine doesnt have to 'tug' it off?

 

[Gino]

I've never seen paper carrier for $116 or #117 which is what we use. It was green mask and always a clear plastic kinda material carrier. Very glossy in fact, so your blade would glide so to speak. Sounds like it's a new roll and having trouble pulling it along. We always dropped ours down to about 20% speed and weight almost all the way up.

 

[Mainframe]

Go as slow on the speed as you can, also, get a hair dryer or heat gun and warm the material, before and during the cutting process, seems to help some times.

 

[mfatty500]

I used to use that brand for cutting rhinestone template for apparel decoration. I used to remove it from the carrier and place it on a cutting mat and make 2 passes at slower speed. But the cutting mat I use is only 12" x 18". If your image is bigger that that you could do in it 2 pieces?

 

[Jillbeans]

Sounds like your theta belt might be going bad.
Love....Jill

 

[brian oliver]

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

 

[TammieH]

Yeah, as been said, slow your plotter to a crawl...I also used to make a makeshift table for our old Graphtec back in Cincy, so the plotter did not have to deal with the weight of the mask. We preferred Anchor btw, it was softer and easier to cut.

 

[Jester1167]

If it has the plastic liner forget it. It always stretched and tracked so poorly that I gave up. Make sure you have the paper liner if you are going to plot it and save the plastic liner for hand cut signs.

Clarification; it was a thin stretchy plastic liner.

 

[James Burke]

We use Hartco 310 and cut thousands of sandblast masks for engraved bricks every year, and we also have the same issue. The issue you are having results from the material "floating" on the backing paper. When the cutter comes around to complete the cut, the letter or punctuation mark moves slightly. We figured this out when we cut the same design in 2 mil paint mask and vinyl without any of the aforementioned issues. Hartco material (pvc) has a limited shelf life and only becomes tougher as it ages. Anything more than a year old compounds the problem because the aqueous adhesive begins to degrade and get "gummy"...making the problem worse. Slow your speed even further and keep a sharp blade at all times. Jim