markmystuff

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About markmystuff

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  • Birthday 01/01/1

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  1. Hi everyone - we've been successful in the past cutting heavy gauge (about 15 mil) oilboard stencil material with our Copam 2500. We back up the oilboard sheet with application tape (it holds the cut out pieces in place and gives the sensor eye something to measure, plus a rough surface for the grit wheels to chew on). Slow cutting, heavy pressure, a 60 degree blade and a bit of twiddling with the blade stickout and vertical position in the head and it worked reasonably well. Now things are going bad and I can't figure out where it's going wrong. Trying to make cuts now (fresh 60 degree blade and all) the oilboard starts skewing in the cutter and the cuts go badly awry. I think I can feel that the pinch roller tension is not equal between the two rollers, and adjusting them to be equal doesn't seem to make a difference. The outer pinch roller has good traction and the one more toward the center has less, apparently causing the skewing. As a test, I swapped the pinch rollers, expecting the skewing to go the other way. Nope, still skews the same direction. I saw the post about putting longer screws into the pinch rollers to increase pressure and I'll try that tomorrow, but it seems like something else is wrong if the pinch roller swap didn't reverse the skew... Or am I missing something? Help! (and Thanks in advance!)
  2. A bit more experimentation has revealed the source of the problem. It had nothing to do with the width of the material, it was the color! The material we are using (15-mil stencilboard) is dark brown. One piece was slightly darker in tone than the other. The lighter of the two measured fine, the darker one caused the problem. The edge sensing photocell apparently needs something light colored to accurately sense the presence of material. The slight difference in reflectance between my two different sheets was enough to cause this strange anomaly. Sign vinyl, with it's light colored backing paper would never be a problem. If anyone else tries to cut dark material then all you need to do to avoid this is back it up with a light colored sheet or transfer paper and you're good to go. Stu
  3. Hi - We just got our CP2500 - so far so good. We intend to cut sheet goods, not rolls. Our procedure is to push the sheet through the back of the machine, align the leading edge of the material with the cut strip at the front and then clamp down the pinch rollers. Hunkering down to see the fluorescent green tape that marks the location of the drive rollers under the front shroud is a pain. We added a set of secondary alignment tapes to the BACK of the unit where they can be compared to the location of the pinch roller clamping handles - now we can just pop the material in and slide the pinch rollers to a correct alignment with the edges of the sheet. No more stooping down and squinting into the dark recesses of the front trying to adjust black rollers in a dark space! Easy enough for the factory to add them and a big time saver for us sheet-fed users. HTH Stu
  4. Hi all - Our newly acquired 24 inch cutter works like a dream with 6" wide material but gets confused with 5" wide material. Long winded explanation: We put a piece of material 6" x 24" narrow-wise into the machine with the pinch rollers properly set on the drive rollers and spaced at about 5.5 inches and placed horizontally so it is over the optical length sensor windows. Pushing 'Enter->Measure->Sheet->Enter causes the carriage to move horizontally and measure the width of the sheet (actually, it's measuring the distance between the pinch rollers), then the drive rollers traverse the material backwards to find the leading edge, then forward to sense the trailing edge. So far, so good. The display shows the size of the cuttable area and the cutting head goes to the Origin (0,0) of the cuttable area of the sheet. Exactly what one would expect. Sending a file to the cutter gives us a perfect cut. Now for the problem: Changing to a 5" wide by 16" long sheet of material (and correctly re-positioning the pinch rollers 'in the green' and at the edges of the 5" material) and attempting the same 'Measure" sequence the cutter behaves very strangely. The carriage moves in the same left-to-right manner and sounds like it is measuring the width, but then it messes up on the length measurement. It DOES NOT roll backwards to find the leading edge, it just rolls forward to find the trailing edge of the sheet, then parks itself at the right edge in mid-page. So, instead of being at the actual 0",0" origin it is now at about 8",0", but thinks i's at 0,0. Sending a file with the incorrect origin results in just the mess you'd expect. The ONLY change is the width of the sheet in the cutter. Due to a lack of time today I did not experiment with a sheet narrower than 5", nor did I try power-cycling the cutter to see if it would re-boot without error. Anybody seen similar behavior or got a clue about this? I've read other postings that say this machine works on narrower material than the 5" I'm trying to use. Odd... Thanks - Stu
  5. markmystuff

    Greetings from Oregon

    The requisite introductory posting - We're a 3-person shop - new to cutting but lots of experience in the graphic arts - everything from letterpress to offset and beyond to large format ink jet printing. Plus one of us has a day job as a software/firmware engineer for a major manufacturer of embedded systems who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. There are already 4 'brick and mortar' shops doing vinyl in our local market (small town USA) but we have a niche product and expect to be highly co-operative with the other sign shops. We did the research and figured out that the Copam 24 inch machine would do what we needed. We sampled the SignBlazer software before cutter purchase and we were very impressed. Ordered the cutter on Monday, it was here on Wednesday. Wow! (Would have been here Tuesday if we'd ordered earlier in the day. Double Wow!!) Assembled, up and running Wednesday by 2 PM. Very nice machine, heavy duty construction. Theres a glitch that I'm going to post in the support forum, but otherwise everything is just dandy. We're glad to be here - hope our support requests are few and easily solved! Stu (and Victoria and Carla)