can anyone advise on a small text problem on GX24?

[Martin Pearson]

Tim, small text can be a problem for a lot of plotters, you are quite right increasing the force won’t help at all. You could try playing with the offset a little as this may help. Also your choice of fonts will make a difference. Does the plotter have a tangential cutting mode? If it does then you will find that it will do a much better job in tangential mode.

[David Rogers]

If you get stuck (sorry or the pun), apply the entire section & weed it off the job if you are applying in-house.

I frequently cut sub 5mm text & it’s a mixture of ambient temperature, time between cutting & weeding, blade sharpness & machine accuracy/wear.

Ideally (for me), fairly cool as vinyl more stable & less sticky, weeded immediately to prevent the adhesive re-bonding to the cut side, newish blade & good condition holder for ultra crisp cuts.

As Martin said – playing with various signmaking specific fonts (as TTF’s can sometimes be a pain at small sizes), tweaking the offset & also lower the cut speed.

Dave

[Hugh Potter]

just my own experience here…..

i often go with more rounded fonts with small text, well, i avoid any small stuff where poss if i can !! something like ariel rounded, cooper somethingorother, and a couple of others, just try an avoid corners,

always cut spares, if you need 20 stickers, but can cut an additional 5 in what would normally be wasted space, then do so and have them as spares.

make sure to put cut lines in between lines so as to only weed one line of text at a time.

recently on small stickers, someone said to weed it fast, get the edge up and rip it off, "yeah right" thinks I, well after spending an hour weeding 15 carbon vinyl stickers, i decided that since i had three spares, i would try doing one fast on one of the three, result ? not one lost letter, dot, or otherwise, 15 remaining stickers done in as many minutes !

to do the above, the cut must be just right though, do a test cut and check to see if any particular letters ‘catch’ or don’t cut properly, once identified, you could convert to curves and edit the nodes to sort it out, not all fonts are perfect !

the other thing i always to, it weed the waste from the end of the sentence to the beginning, and numbers from the beginning to end, this minimises the amount of bits that weed less easy, such as ‘c’, ‘e’ ‘k’ etc, does that make sense ?

hope some of that is of use !
Hugh

[TimDouglas]

Thanks , tried fitting and weeding then which works fairly well, not sure its a good idea when fitting to another layer of vinyl but. will keep tweeking. Simple text would be best option here i think. Thanks for the insight lads.

TD

[Mike Kenny]

hi
on my old camm1 i reduce the cutting speed for smaller text it works a treat and seems to allow the blade to handle the corners better!
cheers
mike