randalle

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Posts posted by randalle

  2. Posted

    OK, I hope this is it. Once again I'm claiming victory. (but doing it quietly and from another room)

    I realized tonight that the bounding box I use in my print.ai NEEDS to be in my cut.ai also. GRRRRRRRRR. Soooo much time and paper wasted. For some reason, while trying to figure out what happened, I started omitting that step and it went down hill from there.

  3. Posted

    Okay, let me get this straight... You're pressing with the rtape on top of the 3G and shirt, and the rtape doesn't melt or stick or destruct in some way? Or did I miss something? I thought the tape you were talking about was the high-temp tape used mostly for sublimation?

    Yes, I did a transfer once without the parchment. Took me an hour to scrape off the goo from the top plate of my press :blink::angry::P

    Yes, Top Platen - tape - xfer - shirt - bottom platen. It does not stick or melt in any way... but LOL you should see what happens when you use clear tape.... instant melt (but actually easier to peel off than a transfer when you forget to cover it with something). Nope, no high temp tape, just plain 4075 tan color high tac tape.

    You might do it once with parchment just to feel comfortable with it, but I feel really confident that once you try it this way you will really like it for any complex stuff.

  6. Posted

    Ok, I surrender. Fighting this without a keyspan is just getting too expensive. I've lost days worth of work / $. I'll buy the keyspan tomorrow.

    One question, when I do my 3 point calibration at the beginning of my contour cut... I have to hit the 'up' arrow key 2-3 times to get it to jog at all. It takes a few seconds, then jogs up however many times I previously hit the key. Is this normal? Will this oddity exist with a keyspan?

  7. Posted

    Ruining 15 or so sheets of 3G tonight trying to work out my usb issues on my LP.... I got plenty of practice with working with 3G. I believe I've bridged the gap with removing the backing.... just took a little patience (not my strong suit)

    The 4075 is just regular paper, I had to dig and dig and dig... but somewhere on one of the 3G pages @ coastal, they have a little "oh hey, you might want to try this" where they are pimping out the tape for use with 3G. I was desparate, so I bought some on the spot. Short answer, yes... if you use 3G for anything but big squares.... you want some of this tape (imho)

    My first real fiasco with 3G going south on me was a name and a number on the back of a shirt. By the time I got the name square, it was curling... by the time I got the number square... it too was curling and the name was a mushy ball of ink. Total chaos. I do have a teflon sheet, I guess maybe I just had two left hands while trying to put it all together. Even so, I felt the overall experience was very lacking.

    At any rate, I did a few test presses tonight with my tape and 3G and it was pretty smooth. I was impressed. I just stuck the tape on top of my design and walked it over to the press. The tape sticks down to the shirt just enough to hold everything still and square -minus the curly edges. I was able to fret my alignment for a good minute, then press with no issues. Removal was smooth, and the finished product looked GREAT.

  10. Posted

    Paco, thanks for your input. You were correct. Even though it took me a few days to settle down enough to process what you told me. Once I calmed down, it all fell in line. After my uninstall / re-install my '3 point cal' setting was off by default and that pretty much doomed any chance of me getting it to work right.

    I finally did another uninstall / re-install and went screen by screen and setting by setting (slowly). Once I got the 3 point cal + blade offset squared away... it is up and running.

    Thanks again.

  11. Posted

    Maybe I'm missing something, but you do not weed 3G. You print on it, cut around what you print (if needed) and then press it on.

    Unless you're doing something very fancy, or odd, I'm not sure. But I like the stuff a lot...

    Sorry for the delayed response... had a couple day battle with my own stupidity vs. my cutter and my cutter won (until today!!)

    So take a simple shape like a star. Say a 3" star (for simplicity of discussion sakes).

    1. You print the star, then remove all the rest of the sheet by either cutting it out by hand or contour cutting it. If you contour cut it, you can peel away the excess white sheet easily enough. If you don't contour cut it you have to cut it out with no tolerance around the star (no excess white) which makes removing the star (intact) from the backing paper a real pita (in my opinion). These are just my observations, chime in anywhere... please.

    2. Now, in my case with a contour cut star (assuming I actually got it off the backing without tearing it up) I either need to drop it on my shirt to press it and close the press fast enough that it don't curl into a messy little ball OR put tape on it.

    I haven't had any luck not resulting in a messy ball of vinyl. So, I found some RT4075 (i think) that is made for the purpose of holding your 3g still while you work without it bursting into proverbial flames. My first try resulted in it actually peeling some of the ink off the vinyl... thus me making this frustrated post. I will try again tonight with the tape and see if it works.

  12. Posted

    alright. back in business. how 'exactly'... i'm not sure.

    As expected, it was a combination of knowns and unknowns.

    Uncontrollable vinyl feeding.... static, maybe? lack of keyspan, maybe? Not happening today. Weird. <--- but thank all things holy that it isn't.

    Off size on my CC, the 3 pt reg got turned off during my re-install. My bad.

    Also, the 11.81 by 11.81 was actually 11.75 by 11.75. More weirdness. Changed that and did a re-cal of my laser and it has DOBA accuracy now.

  14. Posted

    yes. I know the advice is to get a keyspan...

    Typically, if a true need to run an adapter is present... is it present from the beginning or does it develop after time? My gut would say it would be there fromt the giddy up. Mine ran fine for 3 months, now it has the crazies.

    If that is the ultimate solution, I'm going to be very upset with USC for not making it a standard part of the cutter package.

  17. Posted

    Well, I went in and nosed around with the image size... didn't really change anything, just clicked around in SC.

    (this is where it gets weird-er)

    I saw that a 2"x2" image was saying that it was going to use 6x6 of vinyl. Weird! So I manually set it to a lower setting and cut and it worked. Sooooo, then I opened a file that was cutting incorrectly earlier and all of a sudden it is sized correctly, and cut correctly as well.

    Unreal. It seems as though something got cross in the app and only when I went in and started manually changing things did it correct itself. Mind you, this is across multiple reboots and even a SC uninstall / re-install. The issue did exist after the reinstall.

    It seems to be working now. Fingers crossed for continued good luck.

    I am running W7 and USB only. A few weeks ago, I was contour cutting my brains out on this thing. I had it dialed in perfect. Nothing has changed, just my luck. I can't get it to CC.... up until tonights episode, I could at least count on it to cut normal (not CC)...

    ugggggh!

  20. Posted

    Blade ofset of 0.00000 cant be correct for the start if you use a knife.

    when using a pen to test it is OK.

    I am more interested in the screenshot of the contour cut settings.

    Use a rectangle around your contour and use the three corners as regmarks.

    Set contour cut mark size in SC at 0 mm.

    There is a full how to contour cut correctly written for it in the instructional section by Nukleon.

    Paco

    That was just a SS to get the general settings. I will get a SS of a CC and post it tonight.

    I do use a rectangle, I will scan and post some of my results / tests tonight as well. They are very strange.

    I read the nuke how to, in fact.... I read it a few times, + searching this site, + I googled the issue to death.

    So frustrated.

    Thanks for your help!

  22. Posted

    I'm really struggling with 3G Jet, I mean I WANT to love this product... well, I want it to work... thus I would love it. But it is such a fight to use.

    (a few observations)

    It is HARD to weed.

    If you don't use tape on it, it will curl.

    Unless you are printing and pressing an 8.5 x 11 square... it is VERY unmanageable.

    If you do use tape on it, it will pull off some of the ink.

    Anybody got any tips and tricks to share with me? What is your exact process??

    Thanks

  23. Posted

    I am getting this when I try to CC something. I do the three point calibration, then start the job and the cutter head does a little dance.... left, right, down, back. No cut though, as soon as it does its dance, the image in SC gets this red X through it. ugggggggggggh.

    post-8651-0-55432600-1312132295_thumb.pn

  24. Posted

    I did a bunch of regular vinyl cuts earlier, they were perfect. Only time I have a problem is in contour cuts. And everything about the contour is off the mark.

    One thing I noticed, when you set your first 3 point cal mark, typically... when the cutter advances to the second mark... it automatically takes it to a reasonably close area in relation to mark 2. On mine right now, it is only advancing like 2 inches instead of 4-5". Same oddity occurs when it advances to mark 3.

  25. Posted

    Been fiddling with this for about 12 hours and seems like it's doing nothing but getting worse.

    I have a Win 7 desktop, LP 24", USB connection, SC Pro. A few months ago, I had my contour cuts dialed in and working perfectly. Yesterday, I got an order for some and set down to work....

    Cutter was acting weird, cutting a 1/4" off the mark on all cuts. So I calibrated, re-calibrated, tested, checked, nothing. I drew a new test file, and DID get it to work. It was just a star for simplicity sake. So then I re-drew my customer piece and went from being the correct size (but at a bad offset)... to now being offset AND the size is all wrong. It's like the cut is at 150% of the size it should be. I have created at least 15 different test files... no luck.

    Even tried an uninstall-reinstall of SC.

    Someone, please give me some sanity!