Quick question regarding the SET FOCUS option

Are you cutting or engraving first? The only alignment issues I have had in the beginning are when I cut something before the engrave and the material shifts slightly as it drops from the rest of it, so now I do all my engraving and scoring first, and run the cuts as the last operation.

Engraving first all the designs then it cuts them out

It’s documented on the Support site. Here’s a link, but you can always get there using the menu option up above, and then search for what you need. (I used “belt tension” as my search term.)

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I’m just making sure I understand… Are you saying when the cut is done, it looks like it cut in a different spot than what you see in the GFUI preview image? If you cut something right in the middle of the preview image, it will look exactly right. The closer to the edges of the screen you cut, the more warped the preview image gets. This doesn’t mean you need to adjust your file at all. It’s just the nature of the fisheye lense. You could leave your file totally alone and even if it doesn’t look aligned with the preview image at the end of a cut, it really will be as long as you haven’t moved the wood or the file in the GFUI.

I could be totally misinterpreting your words though.

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No, let me show you a picture. Imagine the magenta line is the cut line and the black circle is my design. I am sending the same artwork at the same time and randomly I get 80% of the cuts centered and the other off. I am not touching anything until its done so no, I am not moving the material and yes I am engraving first and cutting after that and no it doesnt always happen in the same areas but I dont get consistency with this machine

Ahhhh that helped me understand what’s going on. I’ve had this same issue with number tokens I’ve made. Everything is perfectly lined up in the file but gets thrown off a bit when engraving, and it isn’t every token, just random ones. I’ve found what helps mitigate potential shifting like this is using the bed hold down pins. This makes it absolutely sure my wood doesn’t move. Though my engraving speed is never so fast that it wiggles my table let alone my wood. Hmmmmm… It definitely is odd.

Just curious, let’s say that the two things are what you do in a print, and the left shifts but the right doesn’t. Have you tried engraving just the left to see if it still shifts even when printing just the one shape? It may be an issue with how the file saved, or it could actually be a hardware issue. If it still is shifted, it most likely means a file code issue. And it’s hard to see those shifts in the file when it’s uploaded to the GFUI but it very well could be shifted (unless you’ve zoomed in and checked each section… Or something like that…)

I hope all that made sense.

I am glad I was able to make you understand, it is kind of hard to explain. Haha. Well the problem is, I am using the exact same design/file and I have tried doing 2 things. Design a MAIN file that contains the same design file repeated multiple times using the size of the material. Same problem randomly does 1 or 2 off centered and sometimes it doesn’t even do it. Also sometimes the cuts are so clean and sometimes the edges look a little rough.

The other thing I’ve tried is uploading the single design using the GFUI and then copy and pasting it multiple times… Problem persists, randomly, sometimes great sometimes mehhh!

What I ended up doing (because it is not only the random cut that is off centered) I had to modify my design and shift it to the right like 0.02" in order to compensate for the machine error. That is how I can achieve at least 90% good results but even with that sometime it cuts off (meaning it is SUPER OFF because my design is already shifted to the opposite side)

I use the pins too. A lot of them, material is super steady

Man I’m totally stumped why it’s doing that. You’ve got incredible patience too, to be still working at fixing it. I haven’t had to edit my designs at all for my shifting, because it’s only noticeable to me, but that would be so annoying. I can appreciate that you’re doing all you can to mitigate the issues. Best wishes. Maybe it’s just a bug that will be fixed.

Thank you so much. It is very frustrating because I am like a perfectionist and I want to offer quality to my customers and when you have a design so close to the cut line it is super noticeable if it is off by a hairline. I still think my machine came defective but they claim it is fine (although they admitted it had tuning problems before leaving the warehouse and it blew my mind they sent me a machine that didn’t “pass” their tuning). So they ended up “fixing” it somehow online and changing all my machine specs so then I had to redo ALL my designs and shift them differently to the side to compensate for the new “fix”, ha!

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What design program are you using?

Illustrator has an option for decimal precision when you’re saving a SVG. Wonder if it could be something like that?

Illustrator but I am saving the files as PDF

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Are you copying and pasting within the app or everything is set up in Illustrator? I seem to recall something similar to this a while back from copying and pasting in the app, but could also be wrong.

If it were belt, you could sit there and watch it and determine when and where it slipped, and everything after that should subsequently be off.

I have tried both, setting up the whole run in illustrator with everything I need already in place and I have also tried copy and pasting within the app. Now the question is, when has it happened?? Has it happened on both cases or not? I will have to pay attention to that next time

It is random, if it was a belt jump the entire row would be damage, it could be 1 in one row and another in a while different column

Not necessarily, a bit of debris in a belt could cause this behavior.

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Maybe. Maybe not. It could be happening on the transition between steps of the job (score to cut), or somewhere else. Or a piece of debris between moving from this score to that score, or… but watching it may give a clue. Or maybe not :joy:

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