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Titan 3 Contour Cutting Tutorial - VinylMaster, FlexiSign

Greg H.

Please review the attachment to this article for a WorkFlow process for Contour Cutting.

 

TITAN 3 CONTOUR CUTTING TUTORIAL W/ VINYLMASTER

 

Calibration

 

  1. Load a blank piece of paper and the pen tool  into the cutter. 
  2. Hit offline/pause on your cutter to put it into “pause” mode 
  3. Move the pen tool to the center of the paper and hit “enter”. The cutter should now show your speed and pressure and be able to accept a cut. 
  4. Click on the launcher icon (the one that looks like a space shuttle) and open the “Vinyl Spooler” 
  5. Click on the “Barcode Controller” which is located above the connection tab. This will open the Automark Cutting Module. 
  6. Click on “Cutter” (located next to “file”) and select Auto Calibrate Laser Offset 
  7. A pop-up will ask “Auto Calibrate Laser?” and “Do you wish to proceed?”. Click yes. 
  8. The cutter will move around the page without drawing anything, this is an area test. Be sure that the pen does not move off of the page. 
  9. It will then ask “are you ready to auto-calibrate laser?”. Click yes again. 
  10. The cutter will first take some time to draw vertical lines, then to scan them. 
  11. The cutter will then locate a position to draw a few horizontal lines, the scan them 
  12. During this draw/scan portion, there will be a progress bar on the screen and the window will say “processing”. 
  13. When the process is finished, the screen will say “laser offset calibrated” and show two numbers. These are your X and Y offset values. 

Practice Test cut

 

  1. In the Automark Cutting Module (barcode controller) select “Jobs” and then select the Sample File at the bottom of the list. This will open a PDF of the arms test cut. 
  2.  Print the job and load it into the cutter 
  3.  Hit the Laser button on the machine so the laser turns on. Then, set the origin so the laser is under the first mark like it shows on the computer screen. 
  4.  Hit start, the cutter will run through the process of detecting the barcode, marks and finally, cutting out the job. If your cutter properly calibrated, it will draw a line perfectly around the printed designs! 
     

 

TITAN 3 CONTOUR CUTTING TUTORIAL W/ FLEXISIGN

 

FORWARD: Flexisign has limitations on the max length you can actually have the cutter contour cut. This is due to the saga corporation not giving SAi the proper plotter codes for the model of cutter. The max length you can contour cut is around 29x29 inches. If the design is longer than that then it will try and make segmented registration marks that will not print correctly causing the contour cut job to fail. Please make customers aware of this fact.

 

  1. After installing the software, add the setup for the Titan or Titan 2 in your production manager, depending on what machine you have. To do this, create a circle using the circle tool on the left side of the program. Once you’ve made a circle, click on the icon on the to of the program that looks like the tip of a blade holder with a blade sticking out of it. A window will pop up with “select a production manager”. Make sure “on this computer (local)” is selected and then click “OK”. The production manager should then open. If you have no devices added to the manager, a window titled “add setup” will open for you to set up a device. Select “vinyl cutters” and then choose “Titan” as the brand and then select “Titan ARMS” then click “next”. The production manager will have you choose an output port. You can set this up in one of two ways. One way is to determine which USB port the computer has assigned the cutter. To do this, open your device manager by clicking on the windows icon, clicking on control panel and then on device manager (you may need to change the view to “large icons”). In the device manager, expand “universal serial bus controllers” and then right click on “USB printing support”. (You may have more than one of these if you have a desktop printer connected to the computer or if you have a wide format printer directly connected to the computer). After right clicking, left click on properties then click on the details tab. Click on the drop down and then click on “bus relations”. There will be a very long value listed and at the end of it it will have “USB00X” where “X” is the USB number the computer has assigned to the cutter. Once you know the USB number, you will change the output port in the production manager to this value. The other way to set this up is to change the output port to “USB_Printer_0”. Please keep in mind that some wide format printers will also have their port on this so there may be duplicates when you are selecting this. Once you’ve selected the port, click on finish.

  2. Go back to the design page of the program and select the circle. Make the circle around 4” by 4” and then click on “effects” on the top of the program and then click on “contour cut” in the drop down. A contour tool will pop up. On the third drop down menu, you will change the value from 0.500in to 0.00in and then click on the green check mark. This will make the vector for the contour of the circle that we will use for calibration testing.

  3. Click on the icon that looks like a wide format printer next to the blade holder icon we originally clicked on when we set up the cutter. This will open up the print and cut menu. If you do not have a wide format printer of some kind installed, it should prompt you to do so or give you an error message. (wide format printers are usually set up as network devices with IP addresses, but may also be set up with a direct USB connection).

  4. In the production manager, right click on your cutter profile and then click on “default job properties”. In the menu that pops up, click on the tab that has an icon of the tip of a blade holder. In the tab, click on “cutter options”. Tick the “offset X” and “offset Y” so they are checked. Input these values for both the X and Y.

 

X = +22.57 mm

Y = -5.77 mm

 

Please keep in mind that these are known good stock values that should either be spot on or just slightly off. If the contour cut is off you will need to make changes to the offset to correct it. The more positive the X value is, the higher the contour will be placed when cutting. The more positive the value for Y, the further left the contour will be placed.

  1. If you have set up the contour of the circle correctly, you should see a tab in this menu that looks like the blade holder icon. Click on this and then make sure that you have your model of titan selected in the drop down menu for the cutter. There will also be another drop down menu for how you want to send the print and cut jobs. Select “as separate jobs” and then click on “send”. This will send a job to your wide format printer and spool a job in the queue for the titan.

  2. The printer should print the calibration circle we made with registration marks around it. If the printer does not start printing, check the production manager to check to see if the job is holding. If it is holding, right click on it and then click on send.

  3. Once the circle is printed and the material is dry/cured, load it into the cutter and then press the laser button to turn the laser on on the machine. Press the on/offline button to put the machine in the offline mode and then use the keys with directional arrows on them to move the laser roughly an inch down and an inch to the right of bottom right registration mark and hit the enter button on the cutter to lock in the origin point.

  4. Go back to the production manager and then go to your cutter set up. You should still have the contour cut job holding in the list. Right click on the job and then click on send. A windows should pop up asking you if you are ready to scan. It will also have a sensing level that can be changed. I find that a sensing level of around 15 to 19 is typically fine for the level. Click on “scan” and the cutter should scan the document and then perform the contour cut.

  5. If the contour is off at all, review step 4 and make the necessary adjustments so the contour cut is perfectly around the calibration circle. Once you have the values, it is highly recommended that you write them down somewhere for safekeeping so you do not have to run the calibration again if you put the software on another computer or suffer a computer crash.

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