Vinyl cutting question...

[Bike Painter]

Hello,

I'm new to the forum and have a question about our vinyl cutter. Excuse me if this is the wrong forum but I wasn't sure where to post it. Our shop builds and paints custom bicycle frames, so we're not really in the sign business. We have a Roland Stika SV-8 cutter and use it to cut spray masks. We build the graphics in Adobe Illustrator, running on a PC. Most of the time we get a nice even cut, but sometimes the letters or graphics cut where the line takes a dog-leg type course rather than a straight line (or curved, whichever the case may be). Sometimes it's a very noticeable jump and other times it's a very small one, but It always looks fine on the screen. I've tried rotating the image so it cuts in a different direction, but that doesn't help. This evening I cut a spray mask that had the number "20" in it. On the "0" one side had the dog-leg cut on both sides of the numeral but not on the other. We keep a good sharp blade in it and replace the cutter protection strip on a regular basis.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what's going on and how to correct it? We output to the cutter directly from AI. Is there a software that would correct this problem.

Thanks.

 

[ghostwriter1]

Cutters unpredictable results

Hi There,,,
Doesn't sound like a computer or software problem to me, In my 25 years cutting vinyl whatever is on the screen is what the plotter is going to do. It's more likely a physical thing, the plotter is not feeding the vinyl smoothly, or sometimes the knife isn't swiveling easily in the knife holder. Try a drop of thin oil in the knife holder and use the minimum amount of weight (that you can still weed) so the vinyl doesn't bunch up at all. Good Luck, Brad

 

[knucklehead]

Photo of the errant cut would be helpful. Cutter strip may be bad.