fraz

Gotcha, check your pm Hoping Santa drops a new copam on my door before Xmas

Yeah hard to see what is actually going on with poor pic quality. Maybe if I had one in my hands we could come up with a solution. Sounds like a poor materials selection. Also I have limited access to injection molding machine and my bro machines molds for a living. Without even seeing I bet if you molded out of Delrin you'd have a lifetime part. That said, there may be another way to solve too. We're pretty good at solutions

Oh and on the topic of pinch rollers breaking... can somebody please post some accurate pics of a broken one in high resolution so I can see the part and weak spot(s)? Have friend who is product designer and has CNC mill and curious to see if making improved ones is worth it.

Thanks a bunch. It's crazy that new machines are going all USB which is nice... but can be a problem when needing to talk to thinks like a vinyl cutter or a CNC mill. My last 2 laptops, netbook, and my new quad core i7 920 desktop I built and not a serial port in sight. The latter you can always buy a board and fight the config headaches or they offer it as an "extra hopup" for the motherboard. That said, USB is really the way to go if it works so I'll give it a shot. I really want/need the convenience of portability and using a laptop.

Thanks for the responses guys. Edge, I couldn't agree with you more when you say "Sure there wil be incidence of issues that you'll MOST certainly read about. I suspect they are still in the minority in spite of prevelance." My day job is a tech support engineer for over 17.5 years... I of all people "get it" I just want to step cautiously before dropping big [to me] coin. I have seen many other devices suffer on USB->serial UART software converters but I have not encountered any myself as of yet. I have even had all three of these devices live happily on the same box: -r/c electronic speed control tuning -r/c lap counter -cell phone SIM card reader/writer

So I have been on the fence about purchasing a cp2500 for quite some time and figured I'd post my issues to see if anybody had some sensible suggestions. I've had roland stikas for years and have a bit of a clue on how to cut vinyl. My budget is really more for the MH cutters though I like the sound of professional reliability of the copam and may be able to spring for it. My dilemma is it sounds like the copam may not be so reliable with broken pinch rollers, busted springs, and lengthy customer service interactions to get repaired. Not to mention buying replacement pinch rollers on a regular basis at $50 a pop and not even being able to get them is a huge turn off. If I actually started a business where I needed this equipment, this is pretty unacceptable in my book. Seems the way many of you deal is you have other cutters so it doesn't stop you dead. Am I close? Issue #2 is the "don't use USB" mantra I see posted everywhere. Az I posted in the other thread, many new machines are USB only. Any feedback on getting reliable cutting in my future is appreciated.

So I am in the market to buy a new cutter and this is one of the few hangups I have. Many new machines(or motherboards) don't even have serial or parallel ports. Even the newer laptops I got only have USB ports. If USB is so bad and everybody always recommends serial ports, how the heck are people supposed to cope with all these new USB only machines? Seems this is a recurring theme and not just a copam issue.