markmystuff 0 Posted October 20, 2007 Hi all - Our newly acquired 24 inch cutter works like a dream with 6" wide material but gets confused with 5" wide material. Long winded explanation: We put a piece of material 6" x 24" narrow-wise into the machine with the pinch rollers properly set on the drive rollers and spaced at about 5.5 inches and placed horizontally so it is over the optical length sensor windows. Pushing 'Enter->Measure->Sheet->Enter causes the carriage to move horizontally and measure the width of the sheet (actually, it's measuring the distance between the pinch rollers), then the drive rollers traverse the material backwards to find the leading edge, then forward to sense the trailing edge. So far, so good. The display shows the size of the cuttable area and the cutting head goes to the Origin (0,0) of the cuttable area of the sheet. Exactly what one would expect. Sending a file to the cutter gives us a perfect cut. Now for the problem: Changing to a 5" wide by 16" long sheet of material (and correctly re-positioning the pinch rollers 'in the green' and at the edges of the 5" material) and attempting the same 'Measure" sequence the cutter behaves very strangely. The carriage moves in the same left-to-right manner and sounds like it is measuring the width, but then it messes up on the length measurement. It DOES NOT roll backwards to find the leading edge, it just rolls forward to find the trailing edge of the sheet, then parks itself at the right edge in mid-page. So, instead of being at the actual 0",0" origin it is now at about 8",0", but thinks i's at 0,0. Sending a file with the incorrect origin results in just the mess you'd expect. The ONLY change is the width of the sheet in the cutter. Due to a lack of time today I did not experiment with a sheet narrower than 5", nor did I try power-cycling the cutter to see if it would re-boot without error. Anybody seen similar behavior or got a clue about this? I've read other postings that say this machine works on narrower material than the 5" I'm trying to use. Odd... Thanks - Stu Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kenimes 42 Posted October 20, 2007 The length is measured by the "eyes" inbetween the 2nd and 3rd feed rollers coming from the right. If the material bows up a little, the eye may not pick it up. I sometimes hold the material down a little by the front eye when it begins to measure lengthwise, but I also use paper which is fairly flimsy. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
markmystuff 0 Posted October 21, 2007 A bit more experimentation has revealed the source of the problem. It had nothing to do with the width of the material, it was the color! The material we are using (15-mil stencilboard) is dark brown. One piece was slightly darker in tone than the other. The lighter of the two measured fine, the darker one caused the problem. The edge sensing photocell apparently needs something light colored to accurately sense the presence of material. The slight difference in reflectance between my two different sheets was enough to cause this strange anomaly. Sign vinyl, with it's light colored backing paper would never be a problem. If anyone else tries to cut dark material then all you need to do to avoid this is back it up with a light colored sheet or transfer paper and you're good to go. Stu Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kenimes 42 Posted October 22, 2007 Thank you for the feedback, I had not heard of this one yet. I may try some dark oil board here myself to see if I get the same results. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
