darcshadow

Have you tried different software? Sign Blazer is free and works well with these cutters.

If you're comfortable with swapping hard drives, cloning a drive is actually pretty easy with the program CloneZilla.

Probably not ideal I know, but I have some vinyl over the top of my cutting strip to hold it down/patch some cuts. Seems to work well for me.

The pin should be straight up and down so you certainly have a problem with the holder some where. I had one where the holes were not true so that as you tightened up the thumb screw it would cause the blade to tilt, much like in your photo.

Just a guess here, but have you somehow managed to change the width of the letters to something so small they appear as lines? Can you grab a single "line" and stretch it out to make it wider?

Signblazer has that preview feature as well. It's nice to use when your design is say 23.5" wide on your 24" wide vinyl. It is a sanity check to make sure the vinyl is straight and good to go.

I believe someone posted a question along these lines once before so a search might find a VM specific answer, but a general answer would be to use the Windows Character Map program/app to select the character you want then copy and paste into VM.

Is it always 6"? Or could it be time related? have a tried a complicated design that is the width of the vinyl but only a few inches tall? I can't think of any reason why length would play a factor but time could, if the power to the solenoid is drifting down over time that could cause the pressure to be reduced. Have you tried any different cutting software? Again, no idea why that would matter but can't hurt to rule it out.

And it'll only get worse. ha!

That was the first thing that came to mind as well when I looked at it. But yeah, as others have said, need more info. And I'd suggest the same as signyyouup, with the pen installed what do you get when you hit the test button on the cutter? Start with the easy stuff.

Probably an issue with how the CNC software is creating/saving the file. I know I've tried to save some things in formats common to CNC machines and the files never look quite right when reopened with normal vector software. If you could post one of your PDFs I and others can try and import them with various software to see if we can find a solution that will work for you. You might also try saving your files from the CNC software in a different format.

And depending on the design you may be able to break it other places to help hide the splits. A tree for example, you could split off individual branches so that the seams are then where the branch meets the trunk, or larger branch.

My guess here is you tried to cut a raster image. You can only cut vector images. Learning and understanding vectors is the first step is learning and understanding the world of vinyl cutting. And just because a file has a vector file extension, such as .svg, .eps, .ai, does not mean that file image is a vector. Vector files can have raster images embedded in them.

Since most of these are largely text, you'd be better off find the fonts and recreating them.

Corrupted or pirated copy of Corel perhaps? I'd suggest reinstalling it, but sounds like you don't have the disks?