FRUSTRATED! Epilog changing home

[doug king]

Back to frustrated again.... Since my first post I have cleaned the machine as instructed and things have been doing okay. I havent had to do anything with multiple passes since the last granite debacle. I have worked on wood, acrylic, I have made dog tags and done some aluminum but nothing that required more than 1 pass.

I wanted to get this piece completed for the church that I am working for, I put in a second piece of granite tonight and the first pass was beautiful! Crisp clear defined lines and I was very excited... I started the second pass and everything lined up until about 2 inches down and the lines moved over just a small amount, maybe a 1/16 of an inch, then about 1 inch on down the thing jumped over about 1/8 of an inch wasting yet another pieces of very expensive granite.....

So we know the machine is clean, so it looks like a call to Epilog in the morning....

Here are a couple of pictures to show what it is doing...

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[Mike Chance in Iowa]

Have you tried flipping the ribbon cable on the x-axis? That is a temporary solution until you can order a new one.

[doug king]

Have you tried flipping the ribbon cable on the x-axis? That is a temporary solution until you can order a new one.

Order a new one, this laser is only about 2 months old....

[Kim Vellore]

Order a new one, this laser is only about 2 months old....

Doug,
The ribbon cable could be loose, the connector holding the cable could have a bad/intermittent connection. Does it always happen in the second pass and at the same location? Are you rastering the same file twice. usually with bad connection it tends to shift and stay shifted.

Kim

[doug king]

Doug,
The ribbon cable could be loose, the connector holding the cable could have a bad/intermittent connection. Does it always happen in the second pass and at the same location? Are you rastering the same file twice. usually with bad connection it tends to shift and stay shifted.

Kim

Well the last two attempts at doing second pass work this is what has occurred. 1st pass was perfect, the second pass started good but about 1/2 inch down it shifted ever so slightly to the right, about 2 inches below that it moved another 1/8 to 1/4 inch to the right..... I will check the cable, needless to say its getting old and expensive.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

I've had brand new cables arrive bad right out of the package. I wouldn't rule out a 2 month old cable having problems.

When my cable went bad, at first I only noticed what you are seeing during large engraving projects and I thought it was a dirty encoder strip. As time went by, even short projects were bad and everthing shifted to the right.

[Dan Hintz]

Are you sending the same file twice, or are you reprinting from what's already in the laser's memory?

[doug king]

Are you sending the same file twice, or are you reprinting from what's already in the laser's memory?

What is in the laser memory, but common sense tells us there is something wrong when it goes for 1/2 inch right on track then starts to shift over... It did it twice and you can very easily see that the job was on track....

[Dan Hintz]

If you've ruled out a faulty motor/connector issue, I would start to suspect the controller (mainboard) going flaky. If it never fails on the initial etch, but running a file from memory fails at some point, it would lead me to believe memory is getting corrupted.

[Bruce Volden]

Doug, I know you have cleaned the encoder strip. However, once I had this same type of trouble and discovered I had a small "dust bunny" in the contrast reader! The encoder strip is monitored by the contrast reader and it's optics. It is a slot type (black on my TT Epi) mechanism which the strip "rides" between. I blew it out and ran a lint free cloth through it and I could see some dust and hairs? on the cloth~~worked fine after that. HTH

Bruce

[doug king]

Doug, I know you have cleaned the encoder strip. However, once I had this same type of trouble and discovered I had a small "dust bunny" in the contrast reader! The encoder strip is monitored by the contrast reader and it's optics. It is a slot type (black on my TT Epi) mechanism which the strip "rides" between. I blew it out and ran a lint free cloth through it and I could see some dust and hairs? on the cloth~~worked fine after that. HTH

Bruce

I thought about that too, I blew it out with compressed air and used a mirror to get as good a look as possible.. This laser is less than 60 days old and CLEAN! When I pulled the cover off to clean the strip there wasnt anything tht showed up on the Qtips... I use this in my garage with epoxied floors that I mop... The garage doors only go up when I am moving large media in and out (About twice a month)....

I flipped the cable this morning and I am running the same job again on scrap wood so I can try to recreate....

[Peck Sidara]

Doug,

All responses are good suggestions. To keep the frustration to a minimum, avoid having to scrap expensive items, wasting your time...

I recommend using compressed air to blow out the encoder reader. As Bruce suggested, "dust bunnies" can get lodged in between, causing intermittent reading from the reader to encoder (just saw that you tried that already. You might want to take it off completely and blowing air thru it again).

Contact technical support, order up the related components which can cause the shift. Replace one at a time to help determine which is the culprit (I would probably start with the flex cable).

[doug king]

I cleaned the machine again this morning, flipped the cable and I am on the 3rd pass and things are working as you would expect a new machine to work... I contacted Epilog and Brian was super informative and said we had done all the right things.. They are shipping me a new cable and I should get it tomorrow.. He said that the cables typically last a lot longer but they have been known to go bad... So far so good, I am going to run this artwork at least 3 times before I stick any more granite in there...

[Ben Levesque]

Hi Doug

It may not be the same thing, but I've experience the same problem as seen in your photo, if it is so, this should repeat itself at the same area with this particular drawing you are using if you laser another time (try scrap material) somethime the end results was ok, sometime the issue came back (intermittently). All of those transpose or (deportation) of some of the area of the drawing was there because my drawing was created using the Corel trace tool, and I had quite a few hidden lines that my Epilog machine did not like very much, make sure your drawing is clean and avoid the Corel trace if you don't understand or don't control like a hawk all the layers and lines in Corel. Once I understood all this, this problem never came back, ever!

But like I said in the beginning, this may not be your issue, so I've said it, just in case.

Ben

[doug king]

Hi Doug

It may not be the same thing, but I've experience the same problem as seen in your photo, if it is so, this should repeat itself at the same area with this particular drawing you are using if you laser another time (try scrap material) somethime the end results was ok, sometime the issue came back (intermittently). All of those transpose or (deportation) of some of the area of the drawing was there because my drawing was created using the Corel trace tool, and I had quite a few hidden lines that my Epilog machine did not like very much, make sure your drawing is clean and avoid the Corel trace if you don't understand or don't control like a hawk all the layers and lines in Corel. Once I understood all this, this problem never came back, ever!

But like I said in the beginning, this may not be your issue, so I've said it, just in case.

Ben

I completely understand what your talking about but I have to ask, if I ran the job from memory once and it worked fine then I should expect the same results on the second pass.

Right? or am I missing something?