Need Help Roland VS and GR - Printing Crop Marks on Cut Only job

[tag4u]

Hi
We have a case where we need to run a large job of just rectangularly cut blank stickers. We use Roland VS for printing and kiss-cutting and Roland GR for perf cutting. The blank stickers we need to supply on A4 sized "pages". The plan was to Contour Cut those on VS but have the crop marks printed so we can then move the media to GR to have it perf cut into the A4 pages while the VS kiss-cuts the next chunk.

Kiss cutting only (without the crop marks print) is pretty fast and straightforward - it cuts as media feeds.
But to print the crop marks I had to switch to "Print and Cut" type. And here is the problem: it prints the header crop marks and then, instead of starting cutting (or advancing fast till the end and print the footer crop marks ) the machine starts to feed the media very slowly as if it was actually printing except there is nothing to print. After ages of this "print speed" feed it gets to print the footer crops, re-feeds the media, syncs to the crop marks and starts contour cutting. All this takes a huge amount of time.

Any idea of how to make the SW "understand" there is nothing to print in the middle of the page and to let cut right after the header crop marks are printed. Maybe there is another SW which can let me do this ?


Thanks in advance
Ariel

 

[woolly]

how you described the vs handling is what i would have expected,(at worst find the least resolution draft printing mode but the marks will always take a age to print) i would have tried to just used the GR using cut contour and perfcut paths with out the need of marks. or two files cut contour return to origin then perfcut
understand you are trying to speed things up by utilizing two machines but would have thought the GR would bang them out in no time.
just a thought

 

[tag4u]

Hi woolly
Thanks for the advice ... We are currently using the GR for perf cutting only. Having to replace the blade between each type of cutting really breaks the streamline of what we are trying to achieve. But will keep your advice in mind if can't find a faster solution.
I just saw in VW6 manual a chapter about "Cut&Print" jobs type. It should first cut and then print. But it says "this might be disabled for certain machine types" and sure enough it is disabled for VS and SP which I own ...

 

[woolly]

if you are sending 1 a4 file to vw then multiplying up will be a pain
one file containing say 15 a4s laid out in your design program about 1 mts worth cut shapes only return to origin similar set up of the perfcut file so you only change every 15
or just cut every thing, weed then slice them up using a blade down the weeded edge of the a4 cut, more labor incentive but possibly quicker i find perf cutting quite slow really.