Tyson0317

The Orical 951 is what I am using. Good stuff! I'll let you know how it turns out.

Plastic. Thing is, I am worried that if I go with low tack, it will not cleanly peel the vinyl from the wax paper roll. As is, the medium stuff often does not pick up little bits and I have to 'help it' which sometimes causes misalignment.

With wet application, one of the problems that I had was that the vinyl would not stick to the surface and thus I could not easily pull the transfer tape off. I am using medium-tack transfer tape. Is there a trick I am missing, or do I need to buy a roll of low tack tape?

Its a wave pattern going on the side of a boat. Very curvy and a misalignment of even 1/8" will be noticeable. Wet makes me concerned - I tried it once and even though a squeegeed hard and all over, some of the vinyl lost it's adhesive properties. It was a test piece and 2 weeks later its still on, but peeling. Not sure what I did wrong there. Cleaned surface with SimpleGreen first. Added a drop of dish soap to the quart of water, as recommended... I've done a bunch of graphics since without the wet method and did OK. Just something this size is a bit challenging.

This isn't so much a question about the cutter, but rather an application technique. I have a graphic that is 32ft long by 3ft wide and I am not sure how to go about sticking it on. For smaller stuff, I have been using the butterfly method as seen on youtube, but I cannot find any howto information regarding something this size. I could cut it into manageable chunks, but given that it is one continuous pattern, I am worried about being able to align the pieces afterwards. Luckily, the surface is rather simple and without obstructions, protrusions or other stuff to work around. This is the first time that I have done anything this size. Matter of fact, I have not put the transfer tape on the vinyl yet because I am not sure how best to approach putting it on flat and even. Ideas?

My guys looked at the plotter's rollers and cutter and said that everything is fine. I will double-check it tomorrow. Forums are not a perfect system. I made forums (as in wrote code) and ran forums since before they were called 'forums', before the were 'bulletin boards'... Not a perfect system, but seriously I dont appreciate being sold to! I came for help and was told to buy something that had nothing to do with the problem at hand and that is bullshit! And I WILL make $11k-worth of graphics for under $2k just to spite the jackasses at the graphic shop and some on this forum who made remarks about who I am, what I do etc. Simple f'n question - my plotter went nuts 30% into the cut. Serial communication problem/adapter was a good guess. But to tell a guy that the plotter he bought is crap and physically cannot do what he wants and that he is a dumbass for buying it (paraphrasing) is by definition a troll maneuver. Call a spade a spade. I dont care if someone made 10,000 posts here - they need a life. If 3000 of them were on how to set blade depth, they REALLY need a life! Dakota. I bought what I thought was the nicest vinyl for the job. Thin, light and rated for 12 years outdoor life. I didn't know that there was a marine grade - didnt run across that in any of my searching. If you have a product to recommend, I am all ears - that would be useful info. And yes, Google-fu is strong with this one ;-)

I re-read the posts. I distinctively thanked those who posted honest (albeit wrong) advice. By these others I was effectively being told that it was because I didn't spend enough money on a plotter, that it could not do a wave pattern. My post was about a tool path that ran about 30% through perfectly well and then dug the knife in and started unwinding the roll. Given that I saw dozens of videos of people cutting more complex shapes of all sizes and doing things beyond what I would need, I felt that unless USCutter was purposely faking these reviews to perpetuate a complete fraud, I had made a good choice. I called bullshit on the statement that my problem was rooted with the fact that I chose the USCutter MH and told the people who made those comments to stop polluting/trolling my thread with their off-topic sales pitches. I stand by everything that I wrote. The cutter I chose may not be great or tough enough for a professional sign shop, but its plenty for what I am planing to do with it and the problem I had was in no way shape or form inherent to the device. It took us less than an hour to set up the machine, load drivers, software and cut our first "Hello World!" decal, which was followed by about a dozen others before I attempted the wave graphic for our RC boat and hit the problem. Read: Not a setup issue. Per my decision to go this route. I.T. is one of those fields of work that gets very tiring. I know a great many IT guys and there are a finite few who have been in the business as long as I and had not either gotten completely burned out, or fallen off the technology wagon, mentally checked out, left the profession, or worse. I maintain my sanity by stepping out of the box once in a while. I hold a stupid number of licenses and certifications - I get into something, get good at it, get bored and move on. Sometimes it makes money, honestly most times it doesn't. But it keeps my mind busy. By the way, I never said "Speed Boat" - I said "Race Boat"! Geez, get the difference DUMBASS!! (I hope you can read the sarcasm) And there is about as huge of a difference between those terms as between 'printing' and 'plotting'. I could go on for a while and beat a dead horse about the misuse of terms, but just pointing out that you guys are not keeping yourselves to your own standards. On to why I got this plotter... The boat is an advertisement as much as anything else. But being a boat, everything for it has to cost five times as much as it should (if you've owned a boat, you know.) Well apparently some of the local vinyl shops thought that this applied to them as well. I don't understand how our van wrap that was far more complex, with "Printed" Vinyl and had to go around doors, windows, bumpers and all kinds of stuff, cost us $1800, yet a hull graphic on the side of a boat (a slightly curved flat surface) which was infinitely less complex to make and apply - to be cut from only 3 solid colors of vinyl, had to cost $1700-2200!! In all, the whole design that I requested, came back from 2 shops ranging from $6000-11000!! Worse yet, EVERY SINGLE SHOP that I sent my designs to, missed their own self-set deadlines for bid, which does not inspire confidence. I saw the MH machine - if it works as well as it does in the videos and if the reviews I saw on youtube are not faked, it is plenty good enough to do what I need. Application honestly scared me a bit. But for the rates they bid, I can wreck a whole lot of vinyl, throw this machine in the dumpster and still come out on top while learning something new. If I fail, it won't be the first time, but I will learn something anyway. Look at it this way - thus far I am in for about $700. My time is worth money, but I write this off as a hobby and experience. Even if I do sink $2k into this with absolutely nothing to show for it, I have only burned ~20% of the project cost - in business worse things happen. In all my poker sense tells me that this pot is worth a $700 call with a possibility of adding as much as $2k total, as there is a good chance that I will come out on top. Update: The new motherboard arrived overnight a few days ago. We didn't have time to mess with it until today when I set our intern on the job of swapping it. Very simple board by the way! Replacement of which RESOLVED THE PROBLEM! Incidentally, the new rolls of the 12-year outdoor vinyl made it on the same day, so I already cut our first design - going to apply it after work tomorrow! The big blue roll for the hull wave is coming from Timbuktu and wont be here till next Tuesday, so the big job will need to wait till next week. One thing that does bug me. On more than one occasion during my experience on this forum, I have looked up at the address bar at the top of my browser to verify that this forum is indeed hosted as uscutter.com! I cannot believe why on earth they would allow trolls who at any opportunity, even completely off-topic, would try to steer new buyers to competitor products. I don't know of anyone that allows this type of activity on their forums! My experience with USCutter support thus far has been awesome! The plotter works great and on principle we will not be connecting the ground strap just to see what happens! The carpets in our shop are all treated for anti-static and I thought there may be a chance that because of vinyl to metal rub of the roll, there may be some static generated, but that should not matter because the plotter and all of its electronics are grounded and the stand has no electrical components. Anyone here actually have an Electrical Engineering degree? Two of the guys that work for me do and they laughed when I showed them this post. Bring on the flames - they have been a great after work unwind for me!

If all of your posts are are useful as the "Corvette" comment, then yes please keep them to yourself. By the way, everything you described are sensor/position reading errors. Maybe these are prone to these after some wear. I bought my plotter for one project, then it's going on eBay.

Somewhere in the post I wrote 'print' instead of 'cut' and that is all that you can focus on. How mature! How lame! Nobody was confused by what I wrote. The comment that using the word print in searches may not work well was the only valid statement on the subject matter. And yes, I do put ink into my plotter! If you want to know how, ask nicely and the guy with 4 posts might even post a youtube clip to show you how. Per the friendliest, most knowledgeable people on this board who wrote asinine responses to a thread seeking help with the plotter misinterpreting its cut path - I would prefer that such trolls not respond to my threads. Their advice was non-constructive and proved to be WRONG! It'd be like someone bringing in a brand new Ford that got a flat tire, to a repair shop where the friendliest most knowledgeable mechanic who's changed 9547 tires in the past told the driver, "Well you bought a Ford - that's your problem! Don't expect it work like a BMW! I got a BMW and my BMW is the greatest! I too had a Ford when I started driving but a BMW is so much more superior - my BMW has an SMG transmission and VANOS system! Good luck with your Ford and all of it's problems!" Maybe I'm new to plotting - can one of you explain to me how a servo would have prevented the motherboard problem that I was having? Certainly, I am sure that higher end models are better - there is no argument there. As I stated, it would be obvious if they were more reliable, faster, more precise, etc. But the problem that I had was obviously not a stand-grounding issue, nor was it from to a systematic failure due to cheapness. The motherboard had a bad block of memory. While we are at it, can anyone here find me A SINGLE OTHER POST ON THE WHOLE INTERNET describing the exact problem that I was having? It seems like thousands of these MH units have been sold. If my problem was due to it being cheap, then they should all do it, right? The most knowledgeable sages here said that it was so common, yet my Google-foo, found none! Just because a troll has 10,000 posts, doesn't mean he's knows what he is talking about. FYI, the wave graphic went on the 1-meter RC boat as a trial before a larger one goes onto our company race boat later this week when the bigger rolls arrive. Stay tuned for pictures.

VinylExposure and DNA yours were the only replies worth reading. I am not sure what some of the others on this forum are even doing here! For posterity: I figured this out before reading Exposure's post, but he is correct. Importing an outline, does weird things to the path and makes it needlessly complex. I used the bucket tool to make the shapes filled and solid. Following this it printed perfectly! Before that took place however, I had our intern spend a few hours with tech support first reading posts, then researching the support site and finally on the phone. Turns out their tech support is just across Lake Washington from our office! Guy there was really good also. First thing he had us do was pull the serial cable out of the machine and use the included USB straight into the PC. His notion was that the various adapters out there simply took the configuration out of the user's hands. When the USB interface is configured properly, he said that it works best and fastest. After messing with some settings, even at the 4800 baud emulated speed, the job was getting sent to the plotter A LOT faster and the cutting became smoother with hardly any stops. This however did not resolve the problem. Instead of wasting vinyl, had us put the pen adapter into the plotter and flip the vinyl sheet over so that it would write the tool path on the back of the roll. Genius! Hence forth I will be using this tool path test method before printing anything big. After looking at our line drawing, he determined that our tool path was simply being flipped sideways for some reason and that the motherboard in our plotter was bad and offered to ship a replacement overnight. As a professional IT guy, I suspect that the cause of the problem was memory. It is soldered onto the motherboard, so replacing the motherboard will replace memory. What likely happened was that our outlined tool path, was big enough to hit some bad block of RAM that lived in some address range. This did not manifest during the making of less complex graphics, but reared its head with my needlessly complex line drawing. To those of you teaching me about Corvettes... Kindly pull your head out of your rear! Yes, with a cheaper machine I can expect a shorter lifespan. I can live with parts that wear out or need maintenance more often. Maybe slower and slightly less precise cut speeds, etc. But the machine has to function on a simple 24x3 wave pattern! If it didnt and this was a legitimate "it can't do it because its too cheap" problem, then I would consider it a fraud and it would go back. That said, I have seen quite a few videos of these things making some amazing stuff. What I was doing was well within the demonstrated capacity. And your comments that I simply didnt spend enough money, or that my expectations of making a wave hull graphic for my R/C boat were unrealistic, are plainly useless and imbecile!

I could have sworn that my video said 9600, but will try 4800 tomorrow. Per adaptor, we arent using one. Just USB straight into the motherboard via provided USB cable and USB port on the plotter. I think that we have a retired server in the shop that has one of the Intel AH3400 boards in it with onboard native serial. Better than any adapter. The more I think about it, the more I think that this has to be a buffer overrun issue. In the days when memory costs less than $4/gb and with tool paths that are likely in the 100-300kb range, could they really not put a bigger chip in there?? I hoped for a more definitive, "Ohh we had this same problem and X fixed it", but it sounds like we need to try to serial thing and go from there. Thing is, if these are such common issues, why dont they just do away with the USB interface, use the $10 that saves them to put a gig of RAM into the thing and just package a Belkin adapter with the plotter??

No way this is a stand grounding issue! I didn't attach the cable, but this is clearly a digital problem - happens on the same exact spot in the process every single time. No way that this is a grounding problem. Per memory - I also thought this may be the case. The PC is fine, but I assume that the plotter has a memory buffer in it. I thought that maybe the more complex graphic hit some portion of the buffer that was bad. One idea I would have is to slow down the data flow rate to the plotter, but again until we get a true serial connection I dont think this can be done. Also, if the plotter is hard-set on 9600, it may not accept a slower speed. There is not a replaceable memory module in these things, is there? What can be done if this is a memory problem? Send it back?

Ive been reading some other posts - We are using Cuts A Lot Pro and it is NOT in trial mode.

We got our MH 34" cutter in the mail today. Put it together, watched some videos, loaded drivers and got to playing with it. At first, everything was cool - we printed a few small decals, stuck them around the office and all was well. The problem came up when I tried to print a more complex 23" x 2" decal that has a wave motive. The plotter gets started and cuts maybe about 10% of it without problem. But then puts the blade down and starts unrolling the vinyl roll at high speed while carving some nonsense curve on the side of the roll - effectively wrecking the material. We rebooted everything twice, Re-imported the PNG graphic, started from scratch on 3 separate occasions with same exact results. The preview looks correct. We've tried reducing the mat size... nothing helped. At the same exact moment in the plotting process every time it would just dig the knife into the roll, go most of the way right and start carving a weird curve down the side of the roll as fast as it could. We then tried a new smaller graphic just to make sure that something didnt break - it plotted fine. I then took a simpler graphic and stretched it to 23" x 4", it worked fine. We then re-imported the more complex graphic that was having problems and selected "2" as the number of colors. This really should not have changed anything, but the cutter for once got farther than before. I thought we got it fixed, but no - at about 20% it did the same thing as before. Another weird thing that happened was when we tried to slow the cutting speed down to 250. The plotter started cutting in dots. It would move the knife up and down very quickly effectively making 1mm cuts with half mm non-cuts along the lines that were supposed to have been solid. On the SAME EXACT DRAWING, when the plotter was but back to 500, it made smooth continuous lines. We are a professional I.T. firm and I got the feeling that the issue may be with the USB-Serial emulation. We are using the USB cord that came with the plotter, on a USB 2.0 port in Windows 7 Pro x32. Our port settings in the software are set to USB, Auto-port and 9600 Baud emulation. The cutter is set to 100g pressure and 500 speed. We are using "Origin" rather than "WYSIWYG" printing method. I've read somewhere that serial interface is preferred and we will need to dig our graveyard for something semi-decent that still has a native serial controller, load it up with a fresh OS and give it a try. In the meantime I am a bit bummed out. Any ideas about what's happening here??