So I bought a Cameo not knowing this issues. Didn't work right. So I bought an SD cause it is supposed to work just fine. I have had ONE thing cut correctly and that is it. I am over $500 invested in this and have nothing to show for it. I am very disappointed.

I am going to make a video of what I am doing step by step and I hope someone here can school me in what I am doing wrong or refund me what I have bought. I have injuries to both my arms and bought these machines to do the hard work for me. At this point I am about to give up on this hobby all together but I don't want to. I am very frustrated and I hope it is something simple or something I am doing wrong. Everything I cut is either inches off or it cuts the top part find but does the bottom half of the page as if it is just doing what it wants (such as on Thoumounts walls).

Just bought the Fiesty Friar set and hope all you great guys can help me with this. Look forward to hearing your advice. I have a marathon PFRPG session this weekend but am charging my video camera as I type this so expect a follow up soon.

Thanks in advance.

- Adam

I know its extremely frustrating to start...little problem seem like mountains when you dont know whats going wrong.
I think I am right in saying that just about everyone who uses a machine cutter went through a phase of teething troubles getting used to it I include myself in that number for sure
Persevere, post your troubles , and we shall see if we can help get you straight cutting

If you have a spare minute or three...check some of the troubleshooting tips in these threads...I guarantee someone has had, and fixed, the same issue as you seem to be having.


And finally...a warm welcome to the forums, we will try our best to help out , so you can sit around the fire with the rest of us and swap horror stories of fixed cutter problems

I had some issues getting my stuff cutting right at first. I am still working out the blade depth and thickness setting to complete cut everything every time. Are you using a carrier sheet? It sounds like either you are not getting everything lined up correctly (or upside down) or the sheet may have lost its tacky.

I cut one sheet yesterday that slowly got more off as I cut becuase i had not made sure the sheet was fully stuck to the carrier.

Evan

I bought a SD and had so much trouble getting the thing to find the registration marks I gave up. Its just been sitting for like a year or 2 now.

Besides I find trying to glue completely cut out shapes a hassle. I like cutting the arms and things on the wall out after the sandwich fold has been glued.

I typically do the registration mark search manually, and my original woes with reg marks was purely because my printer wasn't printing square. My new printer does, though I still manually find the reg marks. That amounts to using the arrows in the software to move the blade head to a point inside my reg mark. I can probably get a good camera shot of where the blade head is before I tell it to scan.

I used to have problems with cuts being off by quite a bit, and I think it's because I didn't have a stick carrier sheet. It's taken a long time to get to the point where I can make it *just sticky enough*. I've been using a 3M spray mount (not Super77 glue, which I use for gluing walls) and it works great for me. If it starts needing another spray, I might notice a little slipping at one end of the sheet, but it's usually not more than what can be fixed with a little edging with a marker.

I also had some growing pains with different versions of their software. Some versions seemed to find registration marks easier automatically than others, and there was one period of time where I swear I couldn't get a sheet cut right, almost giving up on it myself. I also managed to change the language on the device to Japanese, which drove me nuts.

Things have somehow worked themselves out, and I am going to hate it when my cutter finally burns out. I have used it for a lot more than just terrain cutting - business cards and anniversary invitations, holiday decorations etc. It's really fun to have. But, for terrain, it lets me cut *and* edge or glue at the same time, which speeds things up for me tremendously. I can cut out a page of posts while I'm edging and gluing the previous page, or I can cut out a whole page of anchors while eating breakfast, then scoop up the pieces and bring em to work to edge in my free time.

Aw. Now I feel bad that people own these things and can't get use out of them. I'll try to commit to a quick video of how I use mine, and how it behaves, and maybe that will help one of you guys figure out where things are diverging.

If not literally (since I *do* have to type for a living) I'll at least mentally keep some fingers crossed for you guys!

My largest hang ups when learning to use mine was
A) getting it to rind the registration marks, I use manual where you use the arrow keys to get it to be roughly in the middle of the top right reg mark and then detect.
B) feeding my sheets in the right way... the thing that took some time getting my brain around was you're feeding the sheets in upside down (if you don't it will find reg marks but cut in the wrong places).

If I'm right, I'm guessing you're feeding the sheets in the wrong way around, as I seem to recall when I did on walls, the top looks good, but the rest of the page is messed....

OK. I failed at making a video. I have a 200MB movie file off of my lousy iPhone camera that shows the whole cutting process, including lining up and detecting reg marks, and showing the final output. Somehow the audio was lost, and I'm not entirely sure the best way to share the movie. If you are interested, I could make it accessible for a while via dropbox - PM me if you'd like to see it.

In any case, here's a screen capture of where my cutter head was in relation to the reg marks:



Pretty nice quality camera there, yeah? At least you can see what I mean by "inside the registration mark". So, the keys to my cutting were:

1) I'm using the cutting mat that came with the device. You can make your own, and I have in the past, but that's not what I'm doing now.
2) The sheet is secured pretty well to the carrier sheet. It's not puffing up anywhere like it's loose, but it's not so glued down that I'll tear things when they come off.
3) The paper is put onto the carrier sheet such that the BOTTOM of the printout is fed into the cutter FIRST.
4) I positioned the cut head on the inside of the reg mark, and had it manually detect the marks. It should be able to scan the three marks it cares about.
5) I have my cut settings speed to something pathetically slow (3) because the blade is really dull. I can cut faster, but it tends to not cut the corners cleanly.

Hey guys! Thanks so much for chiming in. Just got home from my Pathfinder game and taking some time to watch some MST3K to wind down.

I am charging my camera and will see what I can get on youtube here this weekend. I am gonna make a video from starting point to end so hopefully it isn't too boring but at least it will show EXACTLY what is going on.

Thank you again for your support and positive words. I was really excited about papercrafting and the wind was just taken out of my sails when, after buying both machines, a new super printer, over 50 tanks of ink, and reams of cardstock that not a damn thing works like it is supposed to.

Either way it is nice to hear from and be part of a community that seems to care and be willing to help.

- Adam

Would you believe it? It works tonight. I took many videos but none that captured a messed up cutting. Some detected the reg marks automatically and some required manual detection but all cut with no error.

I did find a problem with the Friar 3in walls. There doesn't seem to be a third perforation on the gsd file whereas there is one on the 6in wall. This isn't a big deal but it does require a fold that could easily be perforated.

I am crossing my fingers on this one and just printed out mass amounts of upstairs and downstairs walls for the Friar. Firewood pile worked fine but I have a second question.

I have a nice printer and good in but the prints seem to be rather dark. It may be he way they are supposed to be due to the fantasy nature of the theme but I am wondering if I am missing a setting and therefore the colors are printing darker.

I have a Canon MX882 and it does a great job. Anyway, I will spend the next two days trying to duplicate the problems I have been having but maybe just joining the board fixed the issue by community magic.

- Adam

That's great news! I hope it holds up. I use a Canon MX870 and felt my prints were too dark as well. After installing a continuous ink system, I finally took the time to fiddle with my print settings to lighten things up. I'll let you know the settings I use. If you are ever in the market for an ink system, I can share what I've learned, from mistakes I've made.

Excellent...glad you got things sorted and working
It seems everyone has a little while at the beginning where things just dont cut.....until things just seem to click into place. Hopefully you should have few problems now

A useful resource for all our cutting files is linked to in this topic http://www.worldworksgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=10018
There is a "Generic Walls" zip in the directory that has the corrected 3" wall cut profile...plus most of the other cutfiles from the sets...so worth looking here if you ever have a cutfile problem

And I also use a Canon, the iP 4700 for which I bought a CISS. it seems they do tend to print a little dark as standard for cardstock stuff...I tweaked the setting to get it to print a fair bit lighter, and i have been very happy with the results...so take a little time to explore which settings work best for you One thing I do use...I do not print on high quality setting, just standard setting...the result is much better for cardstock IMHO...but experiment to see if it does for you/
Have fun, and post pics of your builds!

Mine would never find the registration marks even on manual. I can't recall if I had my laser printer at that point or not though. Maybe I'll try playing with it again and see.

It is worth the effort to persevere with LD...once you get things worked through, it becomes routine and a lot easier than hand cutting

I'm in kinda the same boat. I bought an SD starter package off Amazon. Tried out the Streets of Legend set and nothing has been cutting right. And because I've worked tech support before, here's all the details.

Short version:
The cuts seem to be off both horizontally and vertically.

Long version:
I've installed the latest Silhouette Studio and I believe I have the latest drivers. I haven't been to any other sites to download drivers, so I'm assuming that when I updated Silhouette Studio that it updated the drivers I needed. (Not a safe bet, I admit).
I print off a page of Streets of Legend and it has two vertical lines near the bottom of the page and a "L"s in the top corners. No problems there.
I slap the printoff onto the mat that came with the SD. I'm not going to start making my own mats until I can be sure I can get the darn thing working. I'm putting it in "upside down", as they say. Vertical marks are on the same side as the arrow on the cutting mat.
I put it against the right-most mark on the bottom of the feed and press the button to load it into the cutter. No issues there.
I open up the corresponding GSD file and click "cut". It asks me to print the registration marks (I skip*). It tries to find the registration marks. It fails. I try to find the registration marks by moving the blade to be in the "green box" on the screen: beside one of the vertical marks. This sometimes works, but not often.
If/when it does work, the cutter then goes to town, happy as can be and cuts a happy design that doesn't match what I printed. Well, it matches, but it's shifted in both X and Y. About 1/2" vertically and 3/8" horizontally.

*: I tried printing off the registration marks when Silhouette Studio says on a blank page. It was able to find the marks, but still cut the lines in the wrong place. I compared the cuts to the other bad cut where I skipped printing the marks.

Thoughts and self-diagnosis so far:
Looking at the registration marks and also at the cutting mat I'm using (which does have guiding marks for sticking the paper to the mat), I wonder if the cutter is detecting the guides on the mat and considering that as the registration mark.

Thoughts? I'd really like to get this working...

I bought the Cameo a couple of weeks ago. After 1 day with the cameo I was about ready to return it, but somewhere in here I noticed an off hand remark that solved all my problems. If you notice the cameo software seems to expect a dark black square in the upper right corner instead of an "L-shape" line that will get printed out based on the files. While admittedly a pain, I simply take a black pen and a ruler and "box-off" the area and color it in manually. Its not even that picky, you can usually free hand the coloring it in. Most of the time this solves it on the first go, if it doesn't a few more pen strokes usually solves it. Its more work than you should have to do, but its a tiny amount of work compared to the time savings of cutting and scoring anchors and posts.

Occasionally the problem is I didn't put the carrier sheet in the correct spot and just making sure its inserted in the right spot solves it.

I imagine making cut files from scratch would also solve the problem, importing the image to studio and then copying and pasting the cut lines from the provided GSD files to overlay the image (or just drawing your own) and going from there would result in getting a print out with registration marks that the cameo would read more easily. That would seem to be a lot of unwanted extra work as I describe it, but where I could see it most useful is if you only wanted to print certain props or a different number, if you were combining images to make a custom wall/tile or you were using some older sets that don't have the cut files included. I've only attempted a little of this, but it does seem to work better that way as you get the printed black box reg mark.

Hummm...all gsd and studio compatible WWG sets use 4 registration marks, each one being in the corners of the cutable area of the page...and each one should be a squared "L" shape. If your getting two L's and two | shapes thats a problem that will stop registration right there.

Also..the registrstion marks are there to tell the cutter where on the page the image it is about to cut is...you cant print registration marks after printing the image...wont work

It is worth making your own mounting sheets...I found the one that came with my SD to be too tacky, and ditched it after the first few failures...Its easy and quick to put a light tacky spray glue onto a sheet (or several sheets) of cardstock and use those.

But I really think the main problem you are having is the reg marks not printing properly...at least thats where I would be looking first...good luck!

I found the one I got with the cameo was too tacky at first. fortunately so many things were going wrong then it hardly mattered. after a certain number of runs it wasnt nearly as tacky and worked much better over time.

Ah, I've seen that one. You're registration marks aren't being printed correctly (should be all "L") because the printout is being scaled incorrectly by the printer ~OR~ the printable area needs an adjustment.

Are you printing from a Mac? I had the same problems with my HP printer not wanting to behave when printing from my Macbook.

-Eric

Yeah, as SOON as I posted that, I tried printing again with the registration marks' thickness turned to the max and they came out as "L"s all the way around. Yeah. That did the trick.
Now I feel like a moron.

A moron who hopes to have LOADS of terrain printed out soon!

Having a problem and asking for help isn't moronic, that's just plain smart. (Not asking for help, however, ...) You'll also notice from the responses that you're not the only person to have run into this problem.
Good on you for asking.

P.s. A slightly belated welcome to the friendly WWG forums. Look forward to hearing/seeing how your builds get on.

Yeah, but I was getting frustrated over nothing. Well, what seems like nothing now. ;P
There's this moment in Billy Maddison where Adam Sandler's character answers a simple (to everyone but him) trivia question and he raises his arms and proclaims "I am the smartest man alive!" ... Yeah, that's what my first successful print/cut felt like. It's working now, though I have to coax my printer into behaving.

And thanks! Hopefully I can contribute to the forums in ways other than automatic paper cutters.

The point is moot since you've gotten things to work correctly, and you shouldn't need them anyway, but for completeness I'll point out the drivers are separately downloadable:
http://silhouetteamerica.com/drivers.aspx

Walter

The vertical lines happens for me in my printer as well, doesn't print right to the edge my inkjet. I found flipping the pdf to print upside down makes it cut off the worldworks blurb on the top and leave my reg marks printed nicely at the bottom. This way I didn't have to tweak the pdf at all to make it work properly.

I had the same problem. Printing upside down on my lame HP printer worked (though not all applications support that.) In the end, I abandoned that printer altogether for papercraft as it had a .1" stretch over the length of the page.