help making a bleed for cutting out logo

[Gert du Preez]

If only a few logos for a car, cut by hand..

Would take less time than uploading the picture and posting / checking the forum would 😀

[Fabrice Menard]

5mm inaccuracy seems very inaccurate to me (I’m pretty sure a roland print&cut is much more accurate than this).

Is your cutter well calibrated?

How large should this logo be?

On my Mimaki CJV30 I have up to 1-1,5mm inaccuracy in some very rare cases, not more, I’m sure a Roland can beat this.

[David-Foster-]

Hi Simon

An outside the box idea, not sure if you pro’s do it like this but why not print the background colour of the printed logo the same colour as the car? I am sure that will not be as noticeable as rough hand cutting.

[Martin Armitage]

5mm seems to be very innacurate, only time our sp300 had this problem was when one of the clamps had split and was not holding the vinyl with enough force, hence movement in the vinyl

[Gary Birch]

quote Martin Armitage:

5mm seems to be very innacurate, only time our sp300 had this problem was when one of the clamps had split and was not holding the vinyl with enough force, hence movement in the vinyl

We had same issue on ours ….if the van is white why not just print on clear

[Simon Worrall]

Gert. I am prepared to cut these by hand. Still I dont think I am wasting my time putting it out there. Thanks.
Fabrice, Martin, if anything 5mm is optimistic over that size of cut. My printer has always had this problem, and the workaround has always been to cut small numbers of stickers at a time and cross fingers.
I have had a techie look at it, and he seemed to think it was acceptable, although he charged me money to tell me that.
There was a thread going about this on the boards a while back, but nobody had any answers, although a number of people had the same issue.
I seems to be specially bad on the sp540/300, and worse, it is so inconsistent that there is no real workaround.
David, Gary the car is silver, so no real hope there.
Martin, by the "clamps" do you mean the pinch rollers? I will check them when i get into the shop. However this has been a problem since the machine was new, so I dont think that would be it. Maybe the rollers have a pressure adjustment I didnt know about? It would explain a few things if they are slipping a bit.

Simon.

[Gert du Preez]

Hi, Simon,

I also have a SP540, and like you, also have a random problem with the accuracy of the contour cutting. On a previous SP 300 you could cut 1m worth of 90mm discs without it being out ,5mm, but on the 540 it is iffy.

We tried everything. Turning off the heaters works, sometimes.

The "I give up" response is to cut by hand.

If I understand your OP correctly, the problem is with the different colours on the yellow bit, when you give a bleed to cut.

You could redraw the whole thing to include the shades with bleed, and put your cutlines inside that. But I still maintain that it would be FAR more labour intensive than cutting by hand, unless you have to do a fair number of these.

I’m guessing it could would take about 1-2 minutes to cut by hand, on a size of 400 – 600mm. And despite the doubts, I think this can be cut very smoothly by hand. Sign blokes know how to use a NT cutter!

If you find a solution to get the 540 cutting "on the nose" please share! I have tried, 4 different teccies from 2 companies tried…….encoder strip cleaned, pinch rollers swopped around, less rollers, different media, etc etc. Lowering the heat helps, but some media dont like this in terms of print quality. It persists, it is random, and it is bloody irritating.

Let us know what you do with this one.

[Andrew Blackett]

My golden rules for print and cut after laminating;

As many pinch rollers as possible
Heaters as normal
New blade, reduces drag, correctly set pressure of course!
If its something big I reduce the speed of both cut and lift to 10
Move anything away from the front and back of the machine that might cause the vinyl to bang, buckle or otherwise

Align the two front "optical cirlcle marks" over the cutting strip. I can normally feel the cutting strip through the vinyl and aim to position this at the mid point of each circle.

Run environment match before cutting

Used to always struggle but had some really good advice from Chris Wool (cheers Chris 😉 ) and a bit of trial and error and its good now. I find if its as much as 3mm out I’ve missed something from the above.

Andy

[Andrew Blackett]

Oh and I forgot!

If I was cutting that image, I’d vectorise it if its not already, create an image boundary in corel which just represents the outer edge none of the inner curves.

Depending on how big the graphic is, make an inside contour on the boundary of say 2 or 3mm. Break the contour group apart and centre the newly created cut path over the original image.

I know its kinda cheating but if this was say 500mm tall who would notice that its 2mm narrower?

Andy