Roland EGX-600 and Braille Auto-pen

[Jake - Advantage Signs]

Is there anyone here that uses a Roland EGX-600 to make braille signs? I searched around the forum, but mostly found a lot of people asking for sources of signs... Not sure if I'm just not having good luck finding threads, or if they don't exist. We haven't actually managed to get the training done on the EGX since every time the tech comes in for training, something goes wrong with the machine (3 times!). I feel like I'm getting no where with the company we bought it through and no where with Roland, so I thought I'd check here for help.

Not sure if the machine was sold to us with false expectations or not, but the work flow seems incredibly tedious. If there's anyone here that can help, I'll post in more detail.

Thanks!

 

[ams]

While I haven't used any EGX models yet, I have been studying them alot. I was under the impression that it does most of the work and then you just paint the raised letters white. However not true. You route things out, if you have the ADA kit, it pops beads into the holes and for the white raised part, you have to contour cut it out of another material and overlay it. Quite annoying really.


What kind of problems is your machine having?

 

[Jake - Advantage Signs]

You route things out, if you have the ADA kit, it pops beads into the holes and for the white raised part, you have to contour cut it out of another material and overlay it.

What kind of problems is your machine having?

According to Roland, if you make the full sign in the EGX, you would:
-apply an applique
-rout the letters/symbols
-weed away the excess
-drill the holes for the braille
-the machine inserts the dots into the holes

I haven't actually seen the machine accomplish this yet - it has never made a full sign since we've had it(about 6 weeks). We're doing the tactile lettering step in a laser cutter to save time and for the cleanliness, and we have a manual insertion tool for the braille beads, so we have managed to make a few signs as test, but not the way we should be able to.

There were a number of problems with software/set-up when we first got the machine (almost a full day for the tech, and he was on the phone with Roland for a bit of it. The auto-pen (the thing that places the dots in the holes) wasn't operating the way it was supposed to and the tech spent another day here trying to get that work in conjunction with the braille drill. Once they seemed get that pretty much squared away, a bearing failed in the router and had to be replaced. We've started training 3 times, only to have to stop about 10 minutes in for one reason or another.

From the information I've gotten at this point, the machine can't do the braille drill/insert in one operation. It requires the operator to change a number to things in/on the machine, and run the auto-pen as a separate operation.

 

[CanuckSigns]

We run a similar setup to what you are currently doing, but we run a vision engraver. My understanding of the auto inserter is that it's a gimmick, you basically use the engraver to drill the holes, than you have to do a bit of setup to have it put the beads in the holes, in the amount of time it takes to setup, you could have had the beads put in by hand already while having the next sign drilling. Plus the inserter is finicky.

 

[Jake - Advantage Signs]

Yes. This is exactly what it looks like to us at this point. Does the vision engraver insert automatically? I'm pretty fired up over this...we would have definitely spent some extra money or gone with a different machine if I'd known that this didn't actually function the way it's supposed to.

 

[CanuckSigns]

The vision has the option of adding the auto inserter, but we never went with it, when you have 300 signs to braille, it really doesn't make sense to double our machine time and have an employee standing idle while the machine does a job the employee could be doing while the machine is drilling.

The other issue is that when drilling into acrylic, sometimes you need to do 2 passes to get the the correct depth (sometimes a little piece of acrylic filling gets stuck to the nosecone and causes it to not go all the way down) I'm not sure how this would affect the auto inserter as well.

And lastly, look into getting your cutters from these guys Braille Bits + Holders
they use a bit with a changable drill bit insert, it does a much better job than the cutter from Accent, and when you need to replace it, just take the insert out, put a new one in, it's only $16.