Hi all, having one of those occassional gremlin attacks. A client has been watching over my shoulder as I tried to blast out a quick vehiocle graphics job for him for this weekend. Got the layouts done & ready to cut when I ran into a glitch that has been happening once in a while, but always went away withoiut any grief...until now
When I set up a file to use most of the 13" max cutting height I am usually able to get out of my friction-feed graphtec (CE1000-24) on 15" rolls of vinyl, I usually get into the plot screen in Casmate where I can click on an icon that allows me to "check vinyl height" Here, if I see 12.9" & my file is 13" I can adjust the little pinch rollers & avoid clipping my job.
The glitch is that sometimes my pinch rollers are around 13" apart, but the vinyl height shows as 3.94"
In the past I've just kicked out of plot screen, deselect, reselect & go back to plot & I get a good reading.
Today I've tried everything for a half an hour, my client left, half my hairs been pulled out, & I just missed getting busted bitching at my computer by the postal carrier. (actually I think she's probably heard me before & just pretended I didn't have any mail that day... yeah, I think I did yell at it once before)
NOTHING WORKS
Oh yeah, while I'm at it, I can usuially make corrections in my posts without trouble, but every so often I can't just insert letters without them just replacing other letters. The insert key doesn't even seem to work at these times, but 99% of the time I can add letters anywhere with no trouble.
You Mac guys can feel free to bow out on this one. I've had Macs & I must be a Gremlin carrier because even though no one else in the world ever had any trouble with a Mac, my Mac had it's little hic-cups too. Posted by Curtis hammond (Member # 2170) on :
In case you aitn done it like thsi yet Reboot and rehome the plootter. restart yer software
that should do it...
Posted by Howard Keiper (Member # 1250) on :
Doug.. I could come to Maui to check it out... Seems like you have penty of room for a 13" letter on 15" vinyl. Are your pinch rollers spread out to the edges? Using a Graphtec cable? Curtis has the rest of it right. That's a pretty friendly machine..doesn't generally cause trouble. Call me if you can't get it going doing what Curtis suggested...that's what I'd do. howard
Posted by Doug Allan (Member # 2247) on :
Crazy stuff going on today.
I had noticed when I set the rollers more narrow I got a good "query vinyl height" response at 12.70" Later when I tried going more narrow again I got the same exact 12.70" making me wonder if something got altered that set up a new max ht.??
Probably un-related, but I moved a few folders around this morning including my CASFONTS folder which I put into the CASWIN folder. I soon found why I had been letting it stay put for the last 6 years, as my fonts became inaccessable. Moved folder back & no more problem with fonts.
I managed to get my other job cut by consolidating the work into 12.70" & then when I was still getting the 3.94 business, I just decided to cut it without doing the "query" It was 12' long so I hadn't really wanted to risk wasting if I could avoid it. It ended up cutting fine.
Now after shutting down everything (about 4th time) I tried it again & about 3 times in a row I got a white error box offering me to choose close or ignore. The strange part is I've seen that box almost once a week for 5 years & the "ignore" button NEVER did a thing. I ALWAYS ended up closing which didn't close but Crashed the program & then of course you Casmate users know I then would have to close down windows (& all other progs) to be able to launch CasMate again. So THIS TIME the ignore button worked, but then I got another error message saying like "illegal machine query" 3 times in a row had that first-ever sequence of events, & now I can't recreate it. (QUIT LAUGHING BILL!!)
The rollers are still set at what I was earlier told to be 12.7, but even with a 12.7 file, If I query, I get a 3.94" again.
I did just cut a 12.9" file by setting rollers out where I usually do & skipping the "Query" but this has worked flawlessly for 6 years with only the few 30 second glitches untill now.
I think I am going to finally have to learn the Flexi 7.0 sitting in my drawer for the last 6 months Posted by Rick Sacks (Member # 379) on :
I set the rollers as far apart as they'll go and press #2 to initialize the machine. Put in the material with the rollers in a place where the top and bottoms align on the material. Set the lever that pinches the vinyl. Put the blade over just inside the edge of the vinyl and press the origin button, and start cutting. Just skip that querry stuff.You know the material is big enough.
If you had to, in Casmate you could go to MISC,SETUP, click on your Graphtec, SETTINGS, DESCRIPTION, and change the height there.
Posted by Doug Allan (Member # 2247) on :
quote:I set the rollers as far apart as they'll go and press #2 to initialize the machine. Put in the material with the rollers in a place where the top and bottoms align on the material. Set the lever that pinches the vinyl. Put the blade over just inside the edge of the vinyl and press the origin button, and start cutting. Just skip that querry stuff.You know the material is big enough.
That is pretty much what I do 90% of the time (except I think #1 initializes on my Graphtec), but on the other 10% when I've set up a file to use every bit of 13" I have to query. Too many times I've had to use the ole' xacto to finish cutting all the O's, S's G's etc. because the rollers were only set 12.9" apart.
If there never was a "query" option I'd get by OK without, but since I've made use of it this long, I hope to resolve this new glitch.
In the "Description" field in SETUP I have 22.75" as my height & I cut my 24" material inside of that limitation. In the past I have often got reading of 13.4" or 13.5" if I really crowd the paper punched strips, but on long cuts I don't like to trust crowding the paper since a very slightly skewed placement could make trouble.
Here's another question for Howard or Rick... The plotter choices showing up for me in setup are as follows:
The folks who sold me plotter & software have me setup with graf360a. Once that abbreviation is selected & I "add" to my default plotter area it shows as the FC3100-60a Since my plotter is the CE1000-60 I wonder if there is a better choice? Until now everything was fine so I've been content with that choice.
[ May 10, 2003, 01:10 PM: Message edited by: Doug Allan ]
Posted by Howard Keiper (Member # 1250) on :
Doug.. Two things:
You probably know better than I do about the way some characters are digitized larger than others to achieve a better visual balance. C's, O's, S', Q's, maybe others, so if you're putting the baseline exactly on y=0, you're going to ignore any part of the letter that would extend below it.
In the HPGL mode there's virtually no difference in the drivers except for width. A 2100, 3100, 4100, 5100, all CE's, etc. are the same. Flatbeds too. What you should watch out for is to make sure the width you choose is big enough to fit the machine. In your case for instance, you could use the 2100-120 (48") selection for your CE1000-60 (24"), but if you use any of the 24" drivers (those that end in -60), your program may not let you use the full width of a larger machine. howard
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