My experience with the Roland GR 540 Vinyl Cutter - Tracking issues.

[DStanworth]

I'm curious if anyone can get the Roland GR 540 plotter to track more than 12'. I'd love to hear if anyone has solid advice on this issue.

Before I start complaining I want to say I have used a large Graphtec plotter when I ran the vinyl department at Arrow Sign Company in Oakland 15 years ago.
I remember running installation patterns 30' long with no issues tracking. It was a breeze to use, no problems that I can recall.

I purchased the GR540 almost three years ago and for small stuff, most of my work is under 8' long, it's fine. I just picked up a job replacing some illuminated faces, translucent vinyl applied to lexan.
The faces are 12' long. I barely got this plotter to track 12'. A little frustrating after spending $5k on this machine.

I've had to do a lot of trial and error figuring out how to get the machine to track. I just don't think the Graphtec models have this problem.

Dennis

This is one of the smaller faces on this project.

 

[PHILJOHNSON]

Hi Dennis,

Sorry to hear about the difficulties with your Roland cutter. That particular model has repeatability(cutting accuracy over distance) of 4-6' so anything beyond that 6' mark will usually start to drift on you. If you're getting 12' with accuracy then you are doing much better than most with that model. If you need something that maintains the cutting accuracy over distance better then you might consider a Summa cutter. The new S One model has 26' of repeatability and the S2 models can go 40'.

One thing you could try, if the Roland has the capability, would be to panel the longer jobs. Basically you shorten the distance the cutter moves the material forward and backward to smaller, more manageable distances like 4-5', and just cut 3-4 panels if you need to cut a job larger than 12'. If you have software that can sort the output before sending the file to the cutter to help minimize some of the longer forward and backward movements, that might help as well.

Best regards,

Phil Johnson
Airmark Corporation
(800)527-7778, ext. 112
philj@airmark.com