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And just for clarification, you need to ground the vinyl, this is typically done by grounding the stand, typically done by running a wire from a bare metal point on the stand to a bare metal point on the cutter. The cutter is already grounded internally, or at least it should be.

Yep, that will do it. Your welcome.

Thank you all for your help! I unrolled some of the vinyl so there was no tension as it cut and everything worked fine. thanks again. Matt

Maybe, but the product works on your computer and falls on you to know if it would work with your external hardware, which it does. You've simply failed to fully research everything. Don't take that as an insult, it happens to lots of people when they get into something new and don't fully know what questions to be asking.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone who really loves the all in one press functionality. If you're going to go with a budget press I would just get the 15"x 15" swing press. Anything flat will fit on there. The people who do mugs generally seem to do better with Cactus wraps and the supposed cap attachment isn't going to be all that useful. If you want to do caps just get a good Hotronix cap press. Caps are good money BTW if you find yourself working into the HTV garment market caps are reasonably simple (with a good press) and turn high profits. You can pay for a nice press with one or two cases (144) of hats. When I say good press I speak of the Knight or the Maxx or the Auto Open Hotronix which is what I have. There are several other cap presses that may work ok too but the Maxx (made by Hotronix) and the Hotronix have several platen sizes to fit different hats. I actually use a really small kids hat platen on 98% of the work I do because it just fits inside better and doesn't cause as much deformity at the edges. Not that many people do hats so it's an easy niche if you can find the right client. My regular t-shirt clients often want hats and with HTV small quantities are no problem as well. I have a quote going on 700 hats right now. I charge them $7.50 per each and the hats cots me $3.50. With that kind of volume I order plastisol screen print transfers that in that volume will cost me under $0.50 each. You can press at least 24 hats an hour (often closer to 48) so that's over $80/hr up to $160/hr. I pull that hat press into the living room and watch tv while I work, it's great. If you are planning to do sublimation on your own cut work then you will be wanting to use a brush on sublimation product in order to get it to work. I have a little of that I bought from Dakota a couple years back but never tried it. Sublimation will work naturally with polyester but anything else has to be specially prepared. I could see doing something really cool with a laser cut product that is then sublimated.

Attitude always influences the prices with me.

Same here. However, so often, customer attitude CAN have some influence on the price. Seriously.

great numbers, and much appreciated! I tend to overlook caps as I have an oversized melon myself, and would need a handmade version to stop it from getting stretch marks across the graphic, even with the back straps all the way open! But yeah, I always have to stop thinking in terms of" Me me, would I want this?" or everything would have a skull on it, and I'd be my best customer. I was considering that press because of the main press size itself being a good match for the Sawgrass800, the bundling with the printer, and the description saying special attention was paid to ensure even heating. The other plug-ins were just to sort of keep options open, rather than a desire to immediately hop into using all 5.. That being said.. Mugs and hats make a lot of sense. My hope with the dye-sub is to focus on doing it onto stainless steel metal parts I cut.. so yeah, I've been looking at brush-on, and spray-on, clear and white, polyester coatings, and expect a lot of experimentation to get there. I can switch gears a bit, and focus more on aluminum, as it seems easier to sub, and the metal is closer to white, it just costs more (long term) to cut, and when I switch to plasma cutting, it may become an issue.

my pleasure, happy to help.

If you only spent $60 your not out much anyway. Most software is at least $400 for anything worth using. Graphtec is really smart to market some options that you can run with their product that help ease the pain of buying the top shelf cutter. They also run a totally different cutter command language so that their free stuff is only useful to their own clientele. Gotta appreciate clever market control. Best thing is they really ARE great cutters so they are providing a great machine on top of the other promotional benefits.

What sort of problems were you having? Are you new to the world of vinyl cutting and vector graphics? If so, it's possible that your problems are not solely the machine but a combination of lack of experience and the machine being cheap. People new the cutting world also often times have expectations that are not always accurate and some times just wrong. Please don't get offended at any of this, just trying to get a feel for your level of experience/understanding. I'd hate for you to go through the hassle of returning the cutter, getting a new one, and still having issues. I have a MH, which as Dakota said, is about equivalent to yours. I will attest it is not the best but after quite of while of playing and tweaking settings I've been able to get it to do what I need and have learned what the limitations are and have a pretty good feel of what I can and can not do with it.

It's working great

Here is the Vinyl Master guide for the different features of them https://www.uscutter.com/static/PDFs/VinylMaster_Comparison.pdf

Hopefully you didn't miss the comments by several that a value cutter will still do surprisingly passable work if you stay in a certain size range. Nothing tiny and nothing over about 36 inches long. You can do larger but the tracking will cause issues. About the only one we try to steer people away from is the MH. It sounds like budget IS a concern and sometimes thats the way it is. You have and will continue to hear all our own personal advice and you have to go where YOU want to through the process. I would hold off on the Sublimation if I were you. To do a good sublimation job you really need a high quality press. Dye sub is very touchy about consistent and exact heat and it's high heat as well. You would need a swing style press to do anything like keychains or dog tags or other stiff objects. A good quality swing press is going to be a lot of $$$. I tried the sublimation market out and found that online sales tend to be a fight for sales with the lowest priced stuff coming out of China and the custom stuff that will bring higher prices really needs a walk in store environment to have any chance. I never had any luck at all getting any consistent sales that justified the process. Shirts worked good which fell in line with my shirt business but you have to sub onto white polyester and not that many people want white polyester shirts. They make some poly that feels like cotton nowadays but it's still a white shirt.

Are you wanting to import or export DXF files? Or both? From your initial post I thought you were only wanting to import them. In either case, if you have a sample file you can share, post it up and we can do the VM conversion for you so you can see the results, I have VM DSR V4.0 which will import/export DXF files. I'm sure others with the different variants of the program can help and find you the cheapest version that will meet your needs.

I think we all get to that point after a little experience. You know what it's going to take to build and what most are willing to pay. Off the cuff quote. I actually make a killing on vehicle graphics now that I don't want to do them anymore. My day job is just too busy to allow me to mess with things that have to be done during daylight. I mostly cut for self installers and charge enough that I am surprised they keep calling back.