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can anyone help with coreldraw & redsail cutter please?
Hi there,
I’m new to all this, and I think I’m going slowly insane. Wondered if anyone had any tips for me…
Here’s my situation:
I’m printing on vinyl with an Epson 1280 and using a cutter to cut round the printed image.
I have purchased a ‘Redsail’ cutter… which may have been a mistake. I can’t seem to find any information about it anywhere on the internet.Theoretically, the system works fine. I have a printer driver for the redsail cutter and I can use Corel Draw to output a hairline vector to it. It happily draws or cuts whatever I send to it. The problem is getting it to accurately cut out something I’ve printed on the epson.
No matter where I place the vinyl (I’m using single sheets… it’s a small cutter) it will always cut about 1mm out.It’s very odd too, it’s not always the same…
I print the graphic using corel draw, with a bit of a bleed as well, then I turn off the bitmap and text options and print the same file on the cutter, but it’s always out. Sometimes it even cuts the shape a little bit bigger than the graphic, as if it’s stretched by about 5%.
Yes… I realise I should have spent more money on the cutter and got one with a sensor, etc. But they’re very expensive… 😉
So… are there any tips or suggestions?
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18 Replies
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Hi and welcome to the boards, lots of tips and good people here.
Firstly I don’t know your equipment but I do know a lot about silk-screen printing / digital printing and cutting. We use a cutter that will find registration marks on the vinyl, this will tell the plotter (or program) where the print is on the sticker, it could be stretched & it could be skewed. The registration stage is normally a little red-light that fires out to find all corners of the print, without this we would never register a print, I have tried with old cutters.
What size is the sheets?
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Hi, thanks for your reply.
Yeah, I’ve been reading about the whole registration marks thing… There also appears to be a sensor that will see the edges of my print… Limited budget forced me to get the cheapest cutter I could find. The manufacturers assured me that with a little practice, I’d become an expert at lining the vinyl up… Doesn’t seem to be working out too well…The sheets of printable vinyl are A4…
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welcome aboard mate…
what you “may” have is a rebadged machine. this is pretty common these days but normally find it in wide format printers. if the machine came with manuals, see what the manufactuers name is and more so the model name on the manual. we tend to look at the bade on the machine and assume thats the real name. just a thought…. -
Thanks!
Well, the ‘manual’ I got was A4 photocopied paper, in very broken English. (ahem…)
Maybe I was done. I got the machine from a manufacturers in Hong Kong. They supplied my heat press, which works perfectly…I’m not sure about the rebadging thing… the carriage case has the word ‘redsail’ embossed on it… unless they’re changing the cases too…
Can’t see any other numbers or stickers on the thing…
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have you tried to reset your plotter ? since in each new object cut the plotter realligned it self a little bit center
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I have not heard of the 1280.
What applications are you using the printed vinyl for please? I take it it’s for internal stuff. -
think about it the other way i have done this on occasions.
lay up your graphics first and cut the vinyl first inc the a4 boarder – trim the vinyl down to a4 size then print in the epson like doing labels.
problems i have found is that some printers are not that accurate down the page you may have to introduce a scale after cutting before printing.chris
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I don’t want to be rude but this is a really flakey way of doing things!!
Without proper alignment mark printing and detection you are not going to be able to find the true start position and skew on the page.
Corel is likely to giving slightly different output if you change parameters for printing. I sometimes do tiled prints from Corel to my Minolta laser printer and find that the pinted width can vary fractionally between tiled pages.
From your description, your print area is larger than your cut area by the size of the bleed you have provided. If you consider the top left positions of the print and the same for the cut they will be out. Is this the cause of your 1mm variation? If the sheet feeds slightly differently when cutting, i.e. there is some skew, it will change the position of the cut.
Peter
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well, like in SubtleTease case, mine too such in tight budget, but with a practice now I’m able to cut multi layer on my very very cheap red*ail plotter :lol1: ,still I use the registration mark, but I re alligned the material manually instead of using sensor plotter stuff, what the heck it did the trick
🙁 very hard on the beginning but when i get enough money in my pocket I think I’ll get a better[expensive] plotter
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quote SubtleTease:The manufacturers assured me that with a little practice, I’d become an expert at lining the vinyl up… Doesn’t seem to be working out too well…..
sounds like the average salesman to me 🙄
Mate, you have so many things that can go wrong when you do it manually. Do you have to use A4? Does it not take a roll?
I agree with Peter tho
I am not sure how I can offer any help on this, sorry, but it is just going to take a lot of practise I suppose.
Our new friend from indonesia is obviously doing it with perseverance, perhaps it is just a simple answer… keep practising….
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Hey…
Well, I found a simple answer in the end… the simple answer was: I need a much better cutter.
I managed to get hold of the latest Roland Camm1 GX-24 at a very nice price direct from Hong Kong…
It’s beautiful.The registration system works 100%, it’s fantastic.
The people who sold me the original cutter led me to believe that it would be entirely possible to cut accurately without the registration marks, but it’s simply not the case.
Regarding a4 sheets, I’m using the cutter to cut out t-shirt transfers, which unfortunately do not come in rolls… at least, I’ve not found printable heat-press vinyl rolls… if anyone knows where I might get them, please let me know!
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SubtleTease, would you share me the contac person for roland cam
thanks 😉
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Hi,
I’m not sure who we got it from in the end. I had a friend over in Hong Kong at the time and I found that ‘http://www.synnex.com.hk/’ were the Hong Kong distributors for Roland. My friend called them up and they said they didn’t have the cutters in stock, but they gave him another number to call and he went there in person and bought the cutter. It worked out very cheap in the end compared to prices over here
Best of luck!
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Hey SubtleTease, I have a question for you. I just recently bought a red sail cutter/plotter, and I see that you have one as well. I can’t get it to work under Illustrator CS2, Do you know if I specifically need CorelDraw for it to function?
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quote qmedia:SubtleTease, would you share me the contac person for roland cam
thanks 😉
SubtleTease, could you also do the same for me? :lol1:
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HI IVE BOUGHT A REDSAIL CUTTER AND IT HAS COME WITH THE PROGRAMME ARTCUT2005 ,THE PROBLEM I HAVE IS THAT WHEN IT ASKS FOR THE MAKE OF CUTTER IN THE LIST OF CUTTER OPTIONS ,REDSAIL ISNT
LISTED , BUT THERE IS MORE THAN 1 HUNDRED OTHER BRANDS BUT 99% CHINESE . I READ SOMETHING MARTIN WROTE ON ONE OF THE FORUMS
SAYING IT MIGHT BE REBADGED, THE REDSAIL SITE GIVES NO HELP ,
DOES ANYBODY KNOW THE NAME OF ANOTHER COMPANY WHICH HAS IDENTICLE MODELS???????????????????? -
Well Nick, I made a search on ebay and found identical plotters with the name "SM" MODEL, or Sign Max. Just make a search with the key words "24 cutter plotter".
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cheers for the responce ,had a look on ebay , and couldnt get anymore information ,just spoke to somebody and they told me it runs through roland camm ,which is on the list of devises but theres quire a few and not sure of how to test them all properly
thannks
greetings froim spain
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