darcshadow

have you calibrated the software to the machine? If you cut a large square, say 5"x5" does it measure precisely 5x5?

I know this may not be what you want to hear, but maybe it's time to move away from Signblazer. Your cutter is a CE6000, correct? You can download Graphtec Studio software for free from Graphtec, it is a great cutting software and decent at design. And if you really want to stay with SB, you can always use it for design and just save the files off as an EPS then open that with with the Graphtec software.

Curious, why the need for DFX files?

Gotta love the easy fixes.

You should be able to download graphtecs software for free. I use it for cutting and Inkscape for design.

How are are you going from Inkscape to SignBlazer? I did that in the past and don't remember this sort of problem. The process I used was to export/save the file off as an EPS in Inkscape then import the EPS into SignBlazer. My 2nd question, do you have your knife depth set correctly? The number of nodes shouldn't have any real effect on how it cuts, it just might slow the cutter down a little. If the vinyl is lifting there is a chance you have your blade set too far out.

Interesting, it almost looks as if the cutter is sitting on the stand backwards. If I remember right the old MH's the cutting head had the blade on the other side, so the problem you're running into would not have happened. Could be a case of they redesigned cutter but not the stand.

Could you post a photo of your stand/roller issues. Looking at the photos of the stand online I'm not clear on your problem and am curious to see it. The pinch roller, double check that it's full seated in the slides. But also, you should only really need 2 rollers.

there is a test cut button on your keypad. Does that do anything? Just turn the cutter on, load some vinyl, and press the test cut. Anything happen?

Do you have an older computer you could put an older version of windows on? The manual online says it should detect and download the drivers when you plug it in however it also says if using windows 7 or newer you need to be in admin mode. That tells me the drivers are rather old and possibly don't even exist for windows 11. On the plus side, you do have the serial option. You don't need drivers if using the serial option, you just need a functioning serial port. When you use the serial adapter you'll need to check in your device manager to see what comm port was assigned to it. Some software doesn't like the higher port numbers, so you'd be best off changing the assigned port to 1 or 2 and then setting the cutting software to match.

Photoshop won't do you any good for creating stencils. You need a vector program. Inkscape is a great and free program that will do what you need. It will take some playing with it to get the hang of it though. Working with vector graphics can be a bit tricky when you first start. I am unfamiliar with Signmaster, but I know inkscape can import and export all the major vector file formats. I'm assuming at a minimum signmaster can import EPS files. So if you don't like the design aspect of signmaster, so long as it functions as a cutting software you're good to go. The Vevor, looks like, and I believe it is essentially the same as a MH cutter which is pretty much the bottom of the barrel for cutters. That being said you can do pretty decent work with one once you get all the quirks worked and out everything dialed in. However, for larger decals like you would need for a pinball machine you would be doing yourself a favor spending a bit more and getting a more higher end cutter. The Titan sold on USCutters is a pretty reasonably priced and decent quality machine. And my hat off to you for restoring pinball machines. I have 3 now that I've done some simple repairs to and cleaned. Working on them is almost as much fun as playing them.

MH's are pretty much the bottom of the barrel of cutters. They are great to introduce you to the world of cutting and if you really take your time to dial in everything they can cut well but drifting/tracking is always a problem and there's nothing you can really do about it. The fact that you were able to get it all as close as you did is pretty impressive actually. To get the level of precision you're after you need to look for a cutter that uses a solenoid driver rather than stepper motors. The difference in performance between the two type of actuators is amazing.

Thanks for posting the follow up. "Dirty" power can do some weird stuff but that would not have been on my list of things to look into. ha

The "line" you see is not a line, it's a white star on top of a black star. Either go through and delete the inner or outer star, merge the two, or do cut by color and only cut the white or the black.

You could use the outline tool and then merge the outline and the original line.

Just some advice, you should never rely on a spooler program to remember anything for you. Spooler programs are intended to be a temporary memory location to aid in transferring data Printing/plotting program between and the printer/cutter. The fact that VM spooler shows a history is a bit of an oddity in the spooler world and what ever data it's storing will likely be purged automatically at some point in time.

You could probably use Inkscape/InkCut and the serial connection. I never understood why they say the MH don't work with MACs. You are talking to it through a serial connection, so long as you send the correct serial commands the cutter won't care what is talking to it.

You'd be better off finding the font and recreating the logo.

Really sounds like static to me. Try running the same job that is messing up using pen and paper. If it comes out correct you have a static issue. If the pen/paper messes up, you have other problems.

If you change the size of the stars but want it to still fit in the 13.75x9.75 area the spacing between the stars will have to shrink. Are you ok with that? Also, the stars are not square, so if you make the a 1.254 square they will be distorted from the current design. You ok with that too? I use Inkscape so I don't know the exact commands to do this in AI but here is the process I took to create this. I took one of your stars, resized it then duplicated it 6 times to create the top row. Then I duplicated that row to create the the 5 rows. Then I selected and copied a 4x5 grid of the stars and shifted then down and to the right. Flag Stars.eps

The problem is your first sentence. "a MH with years of use". They don't track well when they are new and adjusting the roller springs is a black art that once you mess with them it's unlikely you'll ever get them dialed back in correctly. If the problem became worse when you changed blades, do you have the blade depth set correctly and did you follow Mz Skeeter's instructions posted hundreds of times on here? If you did not, how did you set the blade depth?

Might try a different USB port. Does the computer recognize the cutter when the USB is plugged in? If it's a university computer, have they disabled USB ports for anything other than Keyboard/Mouse? That happens a lot in the corporate world, admins get carried away with locking down a system for "security". If you have another computer you could put the software on give that a try. Also, try a different software, there are several that have free trials.

What OS you running? Did an update happen and maybe you need to update the driver for your cutter now?

Are you running the latest version of VM? There was a version that had issues with importing SVGs and they would get jumbled up or missing sections. SVG files are not all equal and some programs can't handle the extra information other programs store in them. Two options, that have worked for me export as an EPS then use that, or try saving the SVG file as a flat SVG file.