Jacob Hawkins

Setting up SCAL for USCutter MH 34" questions/problems..

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I have read the manual and the help for SCAL (I have v.4 Pro) and I am still having aggravating problems, so hopefully someone can shed some light on what is going wrong, or if it's me that is doing this wrong.   

The cutter I have is the series MH, 34" version - but out of the box there is a problem:  while the carriage is indeed 34" wide from left to right, the mechanism appears to limit the travel by 3 inches or so.  No matter what arrangement, offset, configuration, or ritual I have tried, I can not, for some unfathomable reason, place an object for cutting on the screen and have it cut at that location on the material, or drawn at that location, in any semblance of a sane manner.

Perhaps it is me, with my expectations and understanding of the elements involved.   I expect that software that I am sold with hardware that I purchase to be fully capable of understanding the actual hardware's physical constraints, and act accordingly - for example, if I send a job to my Designjet Z3200 that has a 44 inch wide platen, and the job is 60" wide, and I have not specified fit-to-media or have otherwise altered its dimensions to fit my Designjet's width, it DOES NOT PRINT THE JOB.   

I obviously am lacking knowledge here about how to align the output width to a mat width in SCAL, or some otherwise elemental and very basic information.   Can someone please enlighten me as to how I can achieve this sort of real WYSIWYG instead of what appears to be quasi-WYSIWYG with floating points of origin?  

Thanks in advance, 

Jake

 

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Why are you even using WYSIWYG? I'm doing signs for many years and there has been no project which would call for that.

The maximum practical cutting width of the 34" MH (or any 870mm cutter) is just 29" across the 30" vinyl media.

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You're confusing advertisement with capabilities. If you read the specs. closely you'll probably find that the actual cutting limit is around 31" as you've seen. Kind of like advertising a piece of wood, 2x4s for example, they are in reality 1.5"x3.5".

Your second confusion is the origin point. When you load the vinyl your origin point will be slightly different every time because you are never going to load the vinyl exactly the same every time. You adjust the cutting head to what you want to be your origin then you hit the origin button.

The cutter and software are doing exactly what they are suppose to do and when you set them up correctly they are fully capable of understanding the hardware's physical constraints and act accordingly.

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I am aware of the actual width this machine is capable of, and I don’t expect the machine to work autonomously - my only problem is my understanding of how to set a point of origin in SCAL that translates to the same point on the cutter.   For example, if I load a sheet of vinyl that is 24 inches wide and 36 inches long, and align it along the far edge (left, opposite the sensor) and feed it “backward” into the cutter so most of the length of the material is “behind” the machine, then zero the origin so the lower right corner is under the cut head on the right side and against the limit/home switch, and I specify the sheet size as a mat size in SCAL, nothing I can do will make this machine cut where I put anything in SCAL.   it ends up offset by several inches on the X axis and somewhere completely different on the Y, usually in the middle of the sheet or the top, or it feeds the whole sheet out and proceeds to happily cut on the platen, to my frustration.

what am I doing wrong?    Is it the software configuration for the output mat size, or is it something I am not doing on the cutter, or is it me and my comprehension of how this whole thing is supposed to work.

 

argh. 
 

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I'll repeat, since you never answered -- WHY do you require WYSIWYG ("absolute Positioning").

 

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Start with turning off the absolute positioning and see if things behave more as you expect. 

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Well, not that I need absolute positioning, I was referring to the view in SCAL labeled WYSIWYG.

 

I just want to be able to throw shapes on a screen and have the machine cut it out of the sheet I put on the machine, not cut half the shape out of vinyl and the other half on imaginary vinyl over the edge because the 18” line on the screen doesn’t correlate to the 18” line on the cutter.

 

 

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Possibly if you showed some pictures of the front of your cutter with the vinyl loaded, FULL view,  and screen shots of the SCalp set up ready to send , someone could help you more.   Forget about WYSIWYG even being in the software. There are many youtube videos on how to operate a MH cutter.  Many tutorials online on how to use Sure Cuts A Lot. 

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You're not trying to use the ruler on the cutter are you? That ruler doesn't line up with anything and really should be removed as it causes more confusion than help with new users.

The WYSIWIG is absolute positioning and is not commonly used. There are very few cases were that would be necessary. Turn that off, put a square anywhere on the screen, set the origin point on the cutter and send the image to cutter. The cutter will cut the square with one corner exactly where you told the cutter the origin point was.

Try that, if it doesn't do as I described then you truly have a problem.

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