blake2415

also check your force. you only need enought to cut thru the vinyl and lightly skuff the wax. Bill

Some things to check. Have a parallel cable that works flawlessly with another printer? Don't rule it out as the problem. The cable that worked with my Mastercutter for years caused the US Cutter to go crazy. New cable and the problem went away. Same could apply to the copam. Don't use a cheap cable. Your computer room is noisy. Add in all the other junk we're likely to have connected and it's a strain for a cheap cable to clearly carry a signal. There is a rated parallel cable and for the life of me I can't recall the rating, but it's an approved two way cable.. meets high quality specs... if all else fails, buy one. They are robust looking with fat wires and bulky connector ends. How good is your memory? Does your pc stay up weeks at a time? If not, start there. Lots of things can interfere with communications and bad cuts are often a precursor to a crash. So if you are crashing, you can't reliably eliminate memory corruption as being the reason for your crash. Using a copam setting or something generic? Major glitch can happen on a setup that might cut fine for a good while.. until that series of commands catches the cutter logic. The one thing I've noticed about all chinese cutters, they lack any real instruction filtering. Send a bad series of commands to some name brand cutters and they just shut down. The far east models eat it right up and do whatever illogical instruction it receives. Too bad. The copam cutter will corrupt the plot if more data shows up before the plot is completed. I wonder what happens if the plot can't fit in the buffer and must wait outside? Could this be a glitch possibly? I was surprised that such a fine cutter would have no management of the port once it starts cutting. Using USB Serial or Parallel? Throw it out. They are not rock solid. I've never had one work right. Buy a first quality IO card and run your system on the IO card. Startech is decent. There are others. Skip the $8.00 non name special. Running an overload of resident programs? Get some experience and try MSCONFIG which is loaded through Start - Run. Unclick any of the start-up programs you don't need and write these down so you can undo this action. YOu might notice substantial speed improvements also. I hope this helps. One of these usuually gets me out of a jam. Bill

Try watching to see when the skuff happens. If there apprears to be no mechanical glitch, make sure your needle sticks out no more than the thickness of a fingernail or even less. Take a scrap stock and adjust your blade to hand cut only thru the top and only to leave an impression on the non stick below. Next, take 3 sheets of material, bout the size of a thumbnail and layer them on top of the blade holder hole. Trim out the hole and the expansion joints. What you are doing here is raising the whole blade system by 3 sheets of your stock.. just a pinch of a lift and the head will make up the difference in travel down to the material when cutting. This seemed to solve my scratch marks. Bill

Billy, Here's a fix for the copam for right now. Set a 30" sheet in, let it measure, then pull out that vinyl and put in your 15" stock. set the paper up for good roller position and then look at the head knife and physically push the head back towards the right side of the cutter until you hit your preferred start mark. As long as you don't remeasure, it will cut all day correctly and without waste. The stepper motor won't be damaged it just slips. If you care to leave it on, you are set for life or until your next power failure. I'm talking with Copam (sorry marcel, I didn't overstep US cutter, but I had a dialog with them before I knew you sold them) and they have an engineer there now looking at the problems. Is anyone here wanting to vocalize to me their concerns, get me a PM immediately.

Marcel, Copam needs to offer better 15" material support. I have not yet figured out how to reliably do 15" width. For now, I'm tricking the plotter with a sheet of 24" paper, marking the edge as determined by copams size feature, then butting up the 15" material to the far left pinch roller/friction wheel. Then I'm pulling out the paper and putting in my vinyl. In any case, I'm allowed only 2 friction points. There needs to be better detection and support for 15" material. The cutter at first impression and I do mean FIRST.. It's very early.. It is an extremely nice machine. The only dissapointing part for me is the apparently fixed width cut increments. This includes a pretty big disappointment.. the inability to cut my billions of 4" and 6" strips that are leftovers from bigger jobs. My cutter will not allow friction rollers on the two leftmost rollers. So... Either it's designed that way or there's some glitch on my end. Is it possible to buy an additionial friction roller and install it on the left side of whatever is blockading the others from sliding to that position? Would this confict with the firmware? Please do not get me wrong, This printer is looking like it will be actually the best I've owned thus far but too bad they spoiled my party by the limited width support or too bad I'm to much of a D... A... to grasp what I'm missing. I'd love your comments. The printer is worth me changing to another width material but I'm loaded here in tons of 15" material. If your reply confirms my suspicion that 15" width material is marginally supported (see Billy's Photo showing 15" install), I'd like to campaign Copam for a firmware update and an extra friction roller. The scenero Billy uses in the 15" example probably won't work for me running sometimes 10 feet in lenght jobs such as signage, etc. I need better grip than two end rollers will allow. Some thinner materials can actual do a arch up during the cutting if you don't have center pinch rollers in place. Another note: Be sure the first question to ask if someone says the parallel port is not working, ask if they used the factory cable. it does matter. The Refine Plotter Parallel cable would not run this Copam. I spent a few hours trying to get it to move tonight and decided to try your suggestion and use the copam cable and it did work. A side note from me regarding USB adapters... Not referencing anything here with USCUTTER, I have NEVER found the USB adapters to be reliable in plotting for any brand. I didn't try yours so, like I said, present company excluded, but I've either had them not work at all or they would shoot off in a frenzy cut once the complex plotting instructions activates the deep routed and typically uneventful bugs that just don't show up with ordinary inkjet printers. That's my 2 cents worth. Anybody not having a parallel port should just go buy one. If you are running windows 64bit, look for the NETMOS chipset in a I/O expansion card as they have 64 bit drivers that work. I'm told that StarCom also now has 64 bit drivers for a few of their cards for anyone running on these new portless pc's and windows 64 bit. I'll await you reply. Bill

Okay, Let me understand.. Starting from the left, there are 4 rollers but only 3 tension wheels. I'm not sure I understand that one... but I have exclusively 15" material. I can't put this material on the first three rollers as it appears I'm only allowed 1 tension wheel for the left two rollers. So, this leaves me with moving up the line to the 2nd and 3rd roller. Now I have only two points of contact on the vinyl. However, when measuring, I'm seeing the head skip past the first few inches of the material. So to cut 14.5" width, I need to put the material in off centered? This leaves a good portion of unclamped vinyl on the right side that's surely to buckle a bit when cutting. What am I missing here? What if I don't auto measure? Is this possible? if so, then were is the "start" of the left edge of the vinyl in this case? Am I correct, you can't have two tension wheels on the left side covering the # 1 and #2 roller? Mine won't slide past what seems to be a stopper of some sort not allowing the tension roller to pass the mark necessary to hit the 2nd pinch roller. Billy, The rollers don't damage the vinyl. The marks you see are waffle marks on the paper and these disappear from the vinyl once it's pulled off the backing. Bill

Even if this cutter is less than perfect, I can see right away the build quality and how much better it is than all China models I've seen. It's build quality is like an army tank but a stylish one for only the richest of soldiers. If this thing cuts half as good as it looks, it's going to be top notch. I'll let you know how the cut quality goes. But for now, this would be the beauty pageant winner over the Refine, Liyu, MasterCut and probably most of the brand names. I'll keep the fingers crossed. Bill

Billy, I'm not quite following this problem. I use all 15" wide rolls. Am I going to be able to cut any height from 1 to 14.95" tall and any lenght? Surely this post snt saying that you must cut in limits set and specific height intervals, correct?

Is it the plotter or the actual font? A lot of windows fonts have these straight line corners that make the turns in about 5 straight moves. It's fine for small print but looks like doodoo on a 5" font. If it's the fonts themselves, you can try to convert them to curves and either hand straighten them. I use a program called EASY SIGN and it has a "round=off" feature that should be in EVERY cutting program. It takes a measure, you specify and converts it to curves. What happens is if the straight lins are 1/8" lops around the tip of a character, you tell the program roundoff 3/16's which will find all of those points making the curve, and average them around the direction they are going to make a curve. The best part of ROUND-OFF is actually with the cut. If you eliminate all sharp points in a cut, it weeds better. The dips in the letter M can be quite deep in some cases. The round off feature shortens that path and lets the cutter blade do a nice clean swoop around versus a sharp direction change. Bill

Not speaking on behalf of USC, are you using a usb connection? I've seen these go whacko before and it has nothing to do with the cutter. What cutter did you specify for your plotter? I found that some of the other chinese cutters when used in place of Roland 1000 work better. The best way to check is to try different cutter/plotter settings, no vinyl in the machine, and the blade holder slipped out. Cut a pattern of circles in circles. You can watch this with the naked eye and see if it misbehaves. Without PINCHING YOURSELF, feel or watch the rollers as they roll in/out as the head goes side to side. If you see this action, then try it again with the pen and paper or even cut some vinyl. A cheap source of testing material is at office max. Get the rolls of brown kraft package wrapping paper and use this as a plotter and pen test sheet. It's a sure way to see what's happening without wasting vinyl. Bill

First of all, I love this cutter. I started using these lower cost China made units and have not been unhappy. This is a good cutter for the money. My only gripe is having to remember to reset the speed and downforce for each boot.. I just hate running off a job only to realize I used the wrong cutting force. First, can this cutter save the last settigns? I don't see that it will when you set speed and force. Second is there a command to set speed at 48 and force at 190 via the plot file? I use SignGo and EasySign. I dont' use SignCut. (Marcel, there are way too many hoops to jump thru on the signcut install. Check with SignGo for thei OEM deal. I know the guy and can put you two together). Thanks, Bill

Hey, You mean this is quieter than the Master Cutter? Mine hasn't arrived yet but that's a good thing to hear. From the photos, it looks like this unit and the Master are built by the same factory in China. that could be good. But if so, I just hope they don't use the same mechanism on the cutter head. The Masters tend to swell after a while in the coil and it binds the up/down movement. I'm on my 3rd head for this, but the machine keeps running... Not bad!