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Is it time to take a baseball bat to my FC8000?

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crickit7

New Member
When I first started doing print and cut files through Onyx Cut Server, the registration on my cuts was an absolute nightmare. all the test would always check out, but some days the darn thing just would refuse to cut in the right spot, not to mention the registration mark sensing issues. After quite a few calls to tech support (I think they only have one technician) He finally said that I may want to start trying Cutting master 2. So I did. And it has been working great up until today.

We sent a job over of 100 2x6, oval-cut decals. It cut right on the money. Unfortunatley the blade depth had changed and it didn't go deep enough. We figured we would reload it and try to cut a little deeper. FAIL! It was not cutting in the same spot...cuttin almost 1/32" from the original cut path!

So I figured I would just offset the cutpath in 1/32" with proper blade depth and we should be okay. FAIL! Sunndenly the scaling seemed off...and we used the same file?!?! The first decal would cut dead on, but by the end of the row the cut is off by almost .188". It's like the cut file is scaled down a bit. Now a simple job is wasting a day. :(

Anyone have any ideas? I'm at a loss. I have tried changing the step size from 254 to 1016 in the software and on the cutter but that only made it worse. Also tried GP-GL instead of auto...no go.
 
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crickit7

New Member
Talked to Graphtec...

...He told me that since I offset the cut path I just need to reprint he whole job and scrap what we printed??! This sounds ridiculou to me. Other cutters I have had, had no problem going over the same cut path. Plus, even though I offset the paths, the decal and the registration marks had not changed. So why would it not cut in the same spot? Makes no sense to me, but I'm over it, so I guess I'm just going to reprint/laminate and hope it cuts the new job in the right spot. :covereyes:
 
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WI

New Member
I assume you're running a single file repeated 100 times or so? You're sure your cut path isn't rotated 180^? I've gotten stung by that before, something might look perfectly centered, but it's just slightly off.

Now why the scaling would be off on the third run, I gotta say an obvious cause doesn't occur to me, but I've noticed that the electric eye in this plotter kinda grows a mind of it's own from time to time. Personally, it has not been my experience that this plotter (or any plotter) just suddenly stops seeing registration marks, or starts interpreting them differently, however I have noticed that this is a fairly fickle and touchy piece of machinery. When it works, it's awesome, when it doesn't work, well... you want to hit the thing with a #$!@ing baseball bat.

Maybe just try it again? It might have misread a reg mark or read the one adjacent to it. Assuming your plastic isn't completely ruined, you could try cutting a single decal just to get all your settings correct, and then run the rest after you're squared away. I get the impression you're already going to have to reprint a few of these anyway.

Best of luck, and if you figure out what caused this to happen be sure to give an update.
 
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spudstr

New Member
Sell the graphtec and get a Summa.. We just went through a registration mark /warrantee nightmare with our FC8000 :(
 
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