my new Mimaki equip arrived the other day!!!

[iSign]

Got the Mimaki uncrated on Thursday!
the technician arrives next week for his working holiday in Hawaii. I get 2 days help & he has a week, so hopefully he will be able to focus on his work for 2 days & I will learn how to make good use of my new toy.

I had to convert my old first floor tool room to a production area so all the furniture in the room with these new machines will be out of here next week. First I had to get a ceiling & walls put into a second floor loft where I used to paint panels. Now I will have to paint on the third floor. The new workshop looks like this:

The old workshop looked like this last week before I got the panel saw out:

..now after some remodeling, it is a few days away from ready:

(yeah... that roll door behind the glass will go up to provide natural lighting & fresh air on cool days when the AC can be off.)

 

[Jen Goodwin]

Nice Doug! The shop renovations look great! Love the new Mimaki - let us know how you like it when you get it up and running!

 

[stopngo]

Sweet set up. Keep us informed on the new machines. That has to be the cleanest shop I've seen in a while.

 

[iSign]

I'll keep you all posted.

Here is one room that got more & more messy as the remodel in other rooms forced all the clutter into my breakroom:

 

[dennis j]

Cool!!!!!!

 

[kalvix]

Cool Digs, Doug!

kalvix

 

[Spot Color]

Hey Doug,
Have you got the venting for the printer worked out? Also, I didn't see a laminator in the shots. Do you already have one?

I'm going thru my own growing pains here so just asking.

 

[Dale Horn]

Looking good. You're going to out grow your space really quick.

 

[iSign]

behind the printer is a grey thing with a scoop looking thing. That is an "air duster" & for $5000 it will allow me to situate it near the printer for adequate filtration of toxicity & odor. I could have went with ducting through 3 ceilings... but then I would be stuck with wherever I decided I want the printer. Knowing me, things will change & this solution will be able to change with me.

I've managed in this unit 8-1/2 years & it started with no partition walls & no lofts... hopefully I can avoid expansion at least untill one of the units next door becomes available.

 

[Baz]

Congrats Doug

 

[Mike Paul]

Looks great Doug.
Are you planning on starting w/ the solvent inks or the ms2 mild solvet?

 

[iSign]

the box says solvent ink 2

 

[David Snider]

Doug, What RIP are you using and what software are you using for your design work?

 

[iSign]

Well, I have recently retired Casmate & loaded up Flexi 7.6 I use Illustrator & photoshop almost exclusively for design. I have a new employee that is outputting cut jobs to the Graphtec using Flexi & print/cut jobs to the edge/envision. Neither of us plan to invest much time in learning Omega for designing & use it instead to import our designs & manage our outputs. Tony is learning Flexi & we will both be viewing the 2 training CD's soon. I expect to continue doing my designing the way I always have, but I also expect to discover which tasks are easier in Flexi & gradully do more there. The plan is to use the RIP that comes with Flexi.

I'm not yet sure exactly how I will set this up because I will have a dedicated computer for the Mimaki jobs & would be moving the Flexi key between the Graphtec workstation & the Mimaki one. I'm sure that will get old fast.

 

[jayhawksigns]

Would you mind telling me how your computers and printer/plotters are setup, not sure why you need to be transfering a key around.

 

[iSign]

The new machines will be in a room by themselves. Printer connected to a dedicated computer by fire wire, plotter by seriel. computer will be conected to a server where files are all stored & auto-backed up.

The edge & graphtec are in the next room & also on the network. When setting up cuts, or outputting to the Graphtec... my employee uses our 1 copy of Flexi. Now that I need to use it for the RIP, I plan to load the software on the dedicated Mimaki compter when I need to output jobs to that.. during this time, the graphtec will be out of comission, unless I set it up as a second device that files can be output from Omega when not sending jobs to the envision.

As I say, I don't expect to be satisfied with this arangement for any great length of time, but I haven't made other arrangements yet either.

 

[jayhawksigns]

How does the graphtec connect with the computer? Don't know much about that brand of plotter. And when you say that the graphtec and edge are in the next room, is that immediately next door??

I ask because we have two plotters and two printers that we reagularly use and only have one copy of Flexi. And on a couple of occassions I actually had all four machines going at once.

 

[iSign]

in the first photo in this post, the edge is the farthest back grey machine before the computer in the left corner... the graphtec is the machine to the right of that computer. The computer that will be outputting jobs to the Mimaki is just out of view to the left of the chair in the foreground. I guess the Graphtec could be set-up as a network plotter & run from the Mimaki computer, but it is more of a need to share software between 2 workstations (different peoples desks) then sharing the software between to plotters 24 ft. apart.

 

[jayhawksigns]

If you can get all of your devices hooked up to one computer than sharing the software won't be that difficult. Thats the problem I went through and reorganized our setup several times to get it right.

If you can get all of the devices on one computer, than you can take advantage of one of Flexi's nice features. Just install the Production Manager on that computer, and install the core design software on both computers, that way you can use either computer, one at a time, without interrupting workflow.

On a side note, one thing that I like about the Inspire XP Pro software that is out now is that you can install and use multiple copies at once. Its basically the old Inspire from Flexi and you buy a site license, that way you and I wouldn't be having this problem.