print/cut alignment driving me crazy

[binki]

Anytime a plotter isn't cutting properly before your run off and start changing parts shotgun style, try removing whatever dust covers are on the tool carriage and with a can of compressed air or a throttled down air compressor, blow all of the dust and crud out of the tool carriage. Pay particular attention to the tool up/down mechanism. Dust and particle contamination in the tool carriage will interfere with the timing of the carriage movements. Try this before running out and buying parts.

Thanks, I will try that as well

 

[damonCA21]

Anytime a plotter isn't cutting properly before your run off and start changing parts shotgun style, try removing whatever dust covers are on the tool carriage and with a can of compressed air or a throttled down air compressor, blow all of the dust and crud out of the tool carriage. Pay particular attention to the tool up/down mechanism. Dust and particle contamination in the tool carriage will interfere with the timing of the carriage movements. Try this before running out and buying parts.

It is worth a try but I have never fixed a printer this way. The cut carriage doesn't tend to pick up much dust or crud as the built in cover keeps it pretty clean. If it's not an encoder problem then it is the rollers

 

[guillermo]

I would agree when the cut is off on the scan as it's normally down to that. This one is on the feed though, so the linear encoder shouldnt make a difference to that

I jump into this and hope my info will help.

I had an issue a while ago, the printing was skipping about 3 millimeter, but it was about every 12" apart, I was going crazy, until I check the motor behind the control panel on a Roland RE 640 and found out that a little drop of ink was on the "disk" (I believe this is also an encoder disk), the one that has the information same as the encoder strip, but in a circle, that reads the feeding, when the sensor got to that ink spot, the machine was not printing and skipping that part on the paper, leaving an streak of no ink.

 

[JKstorm]

I have a Roland VP300. I had this problem and it was definitely a hair line crack in the black pinch roll frame. Look at them with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. In the meantime a short fix is to use the extra rollers if you have them. The ones that you can slide in. I put mine in as a test and my alignments were great. Took them out and the alignments were bad.

I bought just the frames to save money however as simple as it looks it is very difficult to put the rollers, pins and springs back in. It is worth the money to buy them fully assembled.

Now I always use the extra rollers to take some of the tension of the permanent left and right frames. Have had no problems since.