Ebay and goods in Manchester, can not fault the courier service as ordered one afternoon and at home the next morning. It took a while for me to get around to assembling the frame. Quite easy to put up really even without any pictures, did not take long to fathom it out.
Contents of box was a few CD's with drivers, disk with Inkscape and signblazer, USB lead, serial lead, mains cable, spare fuse, pen holder, box with 2 blades and the cutter blade/holder fitted to the machine.
Generally well packed. Powered the unit up, pressed a few buttons and pop, unit dead, Oh bugger, tried fuse no difference, get meter out and found the mains lead was faulty, it is an all moulded item, the fuse is OK but the line line is open circuit. Dig out another mains lead, plug in and unit powers up again, so sign of relief.
I already had Signblazer from my searching on here UK version with the patch so ran that up and connected the USB lead between plotter, made up simple text and a graphic from the library, used the pen and some A4 paper and plotted. Found a few times with USB that the plotter would seemingly stop, I have read that this could happen on a few posts so thought I would go over to serial lead.
Swapped laptop for an older unit with serial port and connected up, and problem gone, so either need to try adding some drivers from disks which I have not yet done, add an earth lead as recommended some where although I doubt if that is the issue as only using an A4 sheet and not a roll of vinyl building up static.
Fit cutter, set 50 g pressure try to cut vinyl and go through the paper, stop it all, check what doing, forget reading the manual is not worth the paper I printed it on.
Lifted the cutter up by a few mm in the holder and checked again, pressing the set button puts the pen down a bit and I can see the amount of up/down movement available.
try cutting again and it scores the vinyl, but will not cut through. several tests and ended up with around 120 to 150g pressure on the screen before it reliably cuts the vinyl, but not through the paper. I could well have damaged the blade previously, but it cuts so at least some success.
When it came in the package there was a thick washer under the knurled head of the cutter holder, I assumed it was to stop it hitting the cutter strip in transit, perhaps it is meant to be there.
I will continue to play and waste paper, ink, time and some vinyl learning what it can do. It does look a better cutter then I expected, quite solid, decent finish and all, so off I go to annoy the wife when watching TV with the sounds of the stepper motor whirring back and forth and the cooling fan from underneath the unit.
Adrian
Reply With Quote
