VS-640 cut missing and white stripes

[xxtoni]

Hello everyone,

I'm a long time reader, first time poster here.

A few months ago I got myself the VS-640 and I have been very happy so far. BUT, there's always a but isn't there.

The two problems I have and to which I have not been able to find any solution are the following:

Print and cut

It prints everything out like it should, looks great and all, once it finishes printing it starts cutting. The first row is perfect, just like it should be, the second row is also perfect, the third row is off by a few milimeters, forth row is off even more and by the time we get to the fifth row it isn't usable anymore and I have to throw it away.

I have already lost around $2k worth of media and ink because of this, I am getting really desperate for a solution.

It is maybe important to mention that this only happens on the vertical axis, never horizontally which lead me to believe that it could be some kind of problem with the pinch rollers.

What I tried:

I called the reseller, he said that it isn't a summa cutter and that it can't cut a hundred miles. But he advised that I should try a calibration, that I did but it didn't really solve the problem because the cutter is spot on in the first two rows and I got the same thing when I tried to calibrate.

I read up on here and I found out that if the pinch rollers are dirty that it can lose grip and that can be the cause. I cleaned them and it was no improvement.

I just tried something desperate and did a factory reset, no clue how that could help but I tried it anyway, printing now to see if it miraculously helped (doubt it).

The other problem is of a printing nature.

This is best explained with the image in the attachment. No matter what I do, on what kind of media I print I always get those white stripes every few centimeters.

When I asked my reseller he said that this is usually due to low quality material. I printed on Oracal until then and I told him to send over some of the good stuff. He send me a few rolls of x-film and the print quality is much better but the white stripes remain.

I clean the machine manually every 15 days and I did a powerful cleaning before starting print right now and I still get the white stripes.

One thing that came to mind, though I don't' see how it can be connected is that the room that I print in is somewhat cool - 15°C (60°F).

There are the only two issues I haven't been able to solve. In the three months that I have been printing I already used up 3 sets of colors and business is going quite well but these are real problems and they really are affecting business.

I'm really looking forward to your replies and hope that some of you guys (and gals) will be able to give me a solution to this.

Heck I'd be willing to send you a six-pack of beer for your troubles, though I live on the other end of the world, but I'd do it UPS style

Thanks in advance everyone!

Best Regards
Antonio

 

[J Hill Designs]

try printing uni-directional to see if it helps with the banding

 

[woolly]

i have a VS540 and both your problems i think are to do with the feed calibration, set it to 0.
alliteratively print with reg marks and send the cut after if that works back to first point

 

[ZsVinylInc]

I would have to say it is more of a temperature issue then anything. If you are printing in a room that is 60 Degrees and your material is at that same temp once you start heating it on the printer to print it, it is going to expand a fair amount and then when you go back to cut the printing is not going to be where the cutting is because of the expansion.

 

[xxtoni]

i have a VS540 and both your problems i think are to do with the feed calibration, set it to 0.
alliteratively print with reg marks and send the cut after if that works back to first point

Hey, thanks for the suggestion.

I just checked CALIBRATION - FEED SETTING and it is 0

Will try separate cut with crop marks.

 

[xxtoni]

I would have to say it is more of a temperature issue then anything. If you are printing in a room that is 60 Degrees and your material is at that same temp once you start heating it on the printer to print it, it is going to expand a fair amount and then when you go back to cut the printing is not going to be where the cutting is because of the expansion.

I've actually thought about this as well. As it is a big issue for me I have pretty much thought of anything to solve it.

It makes sense, will definitely want to try this. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[woolly]

have a look in the profile as well for feed calibrations as well as the machine.
how large an area are you printing and cutting in one go. the more pinch rollers you can use the better bit tricky if doing print and cut immediately.

i normally only do a area about 1200mm sq as that fits my bench for cutting up. and not pushing my luck with the machine.

 

[xxtoni]

have a look in the profile as well for feed calibrations as well as the machine.
how large an area are you printing and cutting in one go. the more pinch rollers you can use the better bit tricky if doing print and cut immediately.

i normally only do a area about 1200mm sq as that fits my bench for cutting up. and not pushing my luck with the machine.

Could you explain the feed calibration part in more detail ?

I currently have a 1.2m wide one in, all the pinch rollers I got are in (6) and we always have the same problem. After 20 cm the cut is way off and simply isn't usable anymore.

EDIT: Just tried with crop marks, same thing happened, no improvement.

 

[the graphics co]

what rip are you using? Are your feed calibrations set differently in the rip than they are on the control panel? Is your rip over ridding the printer for the settings?

 

[artbot]

print a ruler down the side of the print. i do that to track feed. you'd be amazed at how and "inch" can run shorter and shorter and shorter, or maybe longer in your case.

 

[woolly]

also have a look at
menu
cutter config
calibration should be 0

 

[P Wagner]

The stripes in the media look to be at regular intervals. Based on that, I would clean the media feed encoder and sensor. I have seen it get dirty on your machine, causing this problem. That encoder is located in the right side end bell on this machine (assuming you are in the front).

On the other issue (cut mis-registration), how far off (actual distance) is the cut at it's worst? Also, how long is the print cut job in the media travel direction?

 

[Pacific Coast Sign]

When cutting, there is an percentage of accuracy that decreases as the length of the job increases. Kinda like laying floor tiles... if you are off by a 16th on two tiles when you start, then when you reach the other side of the room, you may be 1/2 inch off. It's a similar idea with cutting large runs of stickers.
VersaWorks has a nifty way of handling this. Its called the Special Cut Feature. You can tell VersaWorks to print a few rows then cut... print a few rows then cut... so on and so on. This method will give you the best cut accuracy on those long sticker jobs.
Here is a link to a pdf that will show how to do this: Special Cut Feature

As for your lines... if the lines you are getting are thin and light, then you probably need to set your Calibration. Calibration tells the printer how far to advance the media after each print pass. If it advances too far, you get thin lines that are light in color. If it isn't advancing far enough, you'll get thin dark lines. In your case, its advancing too far. You need to run the Calibration test on your printer. This can be found on page 48 of your user's manual.

Hope this helps!

 

[xxtoni]

I just logged into my account here and saw this thread. We resolved the issue by opening the machine up and just cleaning up the encoder strip.

The interesting thing about the whole situation was that after the Roland dealer ran out of solutions like:

It's the temperature (this had never been a problem, even while printing at temperatures like 15°C)

It's the media (Never been a problem before either, and it happened on all the media we tried ranging from canvas to vinyl). They told us to buy some high quality vinyl and paper from them and that it would fix the problem (this didn't make any sense, but we wanted to try high quality media anyway and they did turn out to be that good, but that didn't fix the problem).

Finally after none of their suggestions worked and we were stuck with a printer that barely worked, WE told them to send someone over. The machine was still under warranty but we had to pay for the technicians expenses. He came here, worked for 6 hours on the machine and still didn't have a solution.

Finally a few days later we opened the machine up, something against the dealer's strict advice and after looking around in the machine for 2 or so hours we found that the encoder strip was dirty. We cleaned it up and what do you know ? The machine worked flawlessly again...

I hope that this helps anyone who has problems with inaccurate cut or stripes on their print.


Everyone, thank you for your suggestions, while it didn't solve our issue, it's good to know that there's a community willing to help.