Jonesy

Interesting. I like your idea of ripping it up and trying to get lucky with a few. Fortunately for me the small jobs I'm doing are reverse weeding jobs which makes things significantly easier!! That said, the detail is still very important!

Sorry about that in that case, I misinterpreted it!! Thanks for the reply, my Graphtec probably was marginally better than my GS24 for cutting very small detail, but there wasn't a lot in it. Maybe I'm remembering things wrong though!

Ah yes, I've played around quite a lot with blade depth, pressure, speed, the smoothing option, and offset.. the cutter cuts fine, it's just for detail work it doesn't seem amazing. It's not bad though, and I love it for larger decals.. they are beautiful!

Interesting.. that work definitely looks cleaner than what my Roland does. Do you know what size the characters are?

Thanks for the example, that's beautiful work! Is the FC7000 just the previous version of the FC8600 or is it a different model line entirely?

Yes - within reason. What I'm basically asking is if a £3,000 machine will produce high quality results for what I'm looking for. At the moment the quality of the work is questionable. Don't get me wrong, the machine is perfect for the larger decals I do, but for the small stuff? Nah. It's alright, but not great. Not sure where the attitude is coming from, I'm obviously just asking if the FC8600 will produce better results.

It's actually not too bad with a very small pair of tweezers, and the item in questions sells well so I'm not too bothered. Just looking to produce the best products for my customers.

They do have tangential cutters which I believe cut more accurately, but they're upwards of £6000 here in the UK.. I'm looking at spending no more than £3000.. I'm interested in the FC8600-60 since it states it can cope with characters around 3mm in size. The characters I'm cutting will never be any smaller than 3.5mm in size. I have had experience with the CE6000 cutting 3.5mm characters and as I say it did a pretty good job, but I'm looking for something that recreates the designs flawlessly. Since the CE6000 spec sheet states it will do 5mm characters, and in actual fact it does 3.5mm characters reasonably well, do you think the FC8600 which states it will do 3mm characters will easily cope with the 3.5mm I'm looking for?

Hello guys, I'm curious to know if there's any plotter cutter that will do excellent work for characters less than 5mm in height. I've had a Graphtec and currently have a Roland and they do pretty well, but upon close inspection you can see they're not perfect - is there anything that's a step up or is it simply not possible? Edit* Just read the spec sheet for the CE6000 and the FC8600-60 and for the CE it says the min character size is 5mm, and for the FC8600 it states 3mm.. is there any difference in the real world? Thanks

I'll contact them and see what's what. Maybe it was my tired eyes yesterday, but the Signcut software does look intuitive to use. Unfortunately the 'read cutter' button doesn't grab any information from my cutter Do you know what the move-step is with this software? Is it 0.01mm or 0.025? Probably sounds silly but it definitely cuts better in this software and I'd like to know if that could be the reason, thanks!

Hi - yep my cutter reads width, however the closest cutter driver option I can choose from in the software seems to be the GX-24 - it seems to cut fine with this though; there wouldn't be a problem with using this option would there? I don't know - I like to think of myself as tech savvy too! Thanks for your reply. Thanks for the reply - it was created in illustrator as a vector file and saved as an illustrator EPS. It seems better with the other programs now, but only on the micro-detail level. I really like how easy to use the Roland software is and it's brilliant for skimming through my larger jobs.

Thanks for the reply Mz Skeeter. I gave signcut a go but I find it very confusing to use.. the results do seem better though! I think it possibly has something to do with the move step increments of the roland software being 0.025mm instead of the 0.01mm the cutter is capable of.. just a guess though. I noticed the setting is available in one of the programs I tried - can't remember which off by hand. I find the 3rd party programs really confusing to work with.. can any of them read the media width from the cutter?

I found it fairly embarrassing to ask so many questions under the same username and felt it might invalidate my questions. It's created in Illustrator and this particular issue (if you can call it that) wasn't apparent on the graphtec which is why I'm asking if there's a way to change the way the cutter is cutting these shapes. It doesn't happen with smoothing on, only when it's off. The problem is that with smoothing on the detail loses its correct shape. Please bear in mind I'm talking about REALLY fine detail here - the letters are maybe 7MM in height and some have lines 1-2mm thick. Thanks for the reply. The artwork is straight from illustrator and the curves are smooth with smoothing on, however the detail loses its shape. Without smoothing on the cutter is very slow and seems to move in a jerky fashion.

Hello everyone.. recently bought a Roland GS-24 and very happy generally but on some of the very fine detail work I'm doing you can see the edges of the circles are comprised of lots of very small lines rather than being smooth.. the only way to eliminate this is to put smoothing on on my cutter but then the detail is lost. I believe the software that I'm using (cut studio) only goes to a move step of 0.025mm but the cutter is capable of 0.01mm. The lines comprising circles appear to be around about 0.5-1mm long... Any ideas? Thanks

I ended up taking it apart and realigning the carriage for OCD purposes... cuts the same but I'm happier because it's straight