Okay, so my new printer arrived Friday. This was supposed to be white-glove, but they only sent two guys to deliver it and they had no idea how to assemble it, so I had to spend several hours unpacking and assembling the new printer. Once the old printer was removed and the new printer had the inks installed and everything was setup, I printed and cut my test file and... this printer has the same problem. It's not quite as severe, but it's still there. At this point, I need to find a way to work around it for the jobs that will be affected by it. It took 3 and a half months to get this far and I'm done with tech support.
Are you sure its the printer? I know you printed a line and put your straight edge on it - but straight edges arent perfect... My aluminum one is a bit warped and the center is a hair lower than the edges.
I only ask because we have the same issue with our graphtec. It'll cut the midle out / start to drift - However we've tried 4 different printers, 2 different shops, the tech has the graphtec and reproduced it on his own printers as well - It starts to cut fine...then drifts and bows in the middle. 1 out of 5 attempts it'll cut the whole sheet perfectly fine.
I was worried it was the printer too, but I feel like the FC9000 series of cutters have a glitch, or bad quality control - Our second cutter cuts better, but still isn't perfect.... our 8600 is hairline accurate. So I'm not sure if the 9000 just doesnt do compensation properly or what... but we've tested our printers a dozen different ways to see if its warping, and its not.
Get some clear media - Something like 3M 8518 if you dont have clear... Print a few rows of the same graphic, with the cutline stroke visible - fold your media in half and see if they all align perfectly. Then cut the second row off... Start at the mid and align it to the left of the first row, see if that matches...
For us it did, and kind of says the printer is printing consistantly spaced, and nothing is warping. Then if you send it through the graphtec and fold it in half... the cut marks dont align perfectly, they start to shift. Thats why I think its the compensation in the FC9000 thats having issues....yours could be different, but the above test on clear media is a good one to try out just to rule it out.
Another test we did was print a 52" Wide ruler with Ticks in it, and compared it to a meter stick... Every tick was surprisingly accurate, both length and width wise.