something does not make sense here but I am still unsure

[gabagoo]

I come from a background in signs wherby you cut your substrate and then fit the graphic to it. I cant seem to get into a habit of oversizing prints and then cutting substrates with registration marks (mostly because most substrates are not square to begin with thus problems). In any case I am working on 15 site signs 32" x 48" I am printing on calendered 5 year vinyl and the majority of print is basically red and black on mostly white, no knockouts or heavy ink concentration. I cut one board in particular to exactly 48" x 32" and then lay the graphic down to line it up for application and it is like almost a 1/4" short on the 32" side. This makes no sense to me and I measure it and it is 31.75". It is not a big deal on these signs and 1/8" of exposed coro top and bottom will not be noticeable but I printed these on our Mimaki jv3 and then cut them in the Summa (square cut). Now if one of the machines was not cutting properly surely it would have shown in die cut decals and anything with close cropping, but the two work incredibly to the point where I sometimes dont even need bleeds. I know the Summa reads the black squares so maybe if the mimaki were printing out of scale the summa just follows along. I suppose I should just print a 12" square box and see what the final size is? anyone else have issues like this?

 

[speedmedia]

Did you try the 400mm test to see if it is printing square?

Thanks,
Kurt

 

[gabagoo]

I have not so is it a file or just print a 400mm square?

 

[jay*doc]

My JV3 did the SAME EXACT thing. My belief was that it was the page feed that was off and after printing enough passes, that little bit starts to add up. And if the Plotter is finding the marks and registering it, it may be compensating automatically, because how does it know if the print is short or if it's running long?

In the end I just got in the habit of leaving bleeds and cutting second, to be sure. I did bundles of 4x6 RTG Site Signs this way and it worked fine.

Good Luck!

 

[Steve G.]

I'd say its the coro, and your prints are right on. I have yet to see a piece of coro actually be square. When you cut that board, if you used any of the factory edges, then it's probobly not square. Alot of times the edges are bowed as well... not straight, or parallel.
You can easily check with a T square or measuring from corner to corner.
If it needs to be sqare and / or straight, I'd mount the print and then cut the coro.

 

[ZsVinylInc]

It is the coro....I recently did a job for a client that was hanging Signs in stores across our state. All of the signs that they already hang in the stores were coro so we made ours the same so they didn't have to figure out a new hanging system. We tried just regular coro and were trying to mount roughly 4' x 8' prints to it and it was way off. I had to actually buy a whole case of special coro that my supplier just happen to have that was specifically made to be square and the flutes were at a true perpendicular to the ends. Then and only then did it line up and work.

 

[gabagoo]

I'd say its the coro, and your prints are right on. I have yet to see a piece of coro actually be square. When you cut that board, if you used any of the factory edges, then it's probobly not square. Alot of times the edges are bowed as well... not straight, or parallel.
You can easily check with a T square or measuring from corner to corner.
If it needs to be sqare and / or straight, I'd mount the print and then cut the coro.

Hold on guys..... It is not the coro. The piece measures 32 x 48 exact because I made sure that it was correct. The graphic does not fit skewed so it is square it is just a 1/4" shorter than it should have been. I will run a test to see if the printer is out.