How do you make sure that when you load your vinyl for a custom pin striping job, your vinyl won’t walk sideways halfway through? One of the most common problems with friction-fed plotters is tracking. Buying the right plotter is part of the solution.

Accurate tracking is one of the features that differentiates entry level cutters from those engineered for professional quality signs and graphics. Many low cost plotters are only suitable for cutting jobs 10 feet or less in length because of inferior tracking capabilities. More advanced friction fed plotters have features designed to enhance tracking. Some of these, like grit rollers, are engineered into the product and require no user input, while others must be activated, as needed.

One such feature is the "Auto Pre-Feed" function. Auto Pre-Feed is designed to ensure proper media alignment throughout long production jobs.  It achieves this by controlling the rolling resistance of the vinyl and by pressing tracks that help keep the vinyl on course as the job is cut.

Rolling Resistance

Loading a full 50 yard roll of vinyl on your vinyl cutter and letting it pull media off the roll is acceptable for short graphics at slow speeds, but not for long or high speed plotting. As the plotter pulls the media across the platen, the weight of the roll produces resistance against the drum and pinch rollers. This resistance can adversely affect tracking and it can cause an X position alarm, especially if you’re cutting at high production speeds. Auto Pre-Feed removes this resistance by automatically feeding the media forward across the platen, then reversing it toward the rear before the plotter begins cutting the sent file. This forward and backward media feed effectively unwinds some of the vinyl, producing enough slack in the roll to prevent tracking or X position problems.  

It's a Groove Thing

In addition to removing rolling resistance, Auto Pre-Feed enhances tracking by making your vinyl groovy: not as groovy as Austin Powers' wardrobe, but almost. As it pre-feeds the media forward and backward, the pressure of the drum and pinch rollers creates subtle grooves or tracks in the vinyl. As the plotting begins, these newly made tracks make the vinyl less likely to shift sideways as the graphic is being cut.

Baby Steps

Let's get back to that custom pin striping job. Say you've got 30 feet of tribal graphics to cut, but you don’t want to have that much brand new 2mil cast premium film fed onto your shop floor to pick up dust. No worries. The Auto Pre-Feed function can be used to manage the tracking of a 20, 30, even a 50 foot graphic in baby steps - that is, in smaller, more manageable sections. If you set the Auto Pre-Feed for five feet, the plotter will pre-feed that amount initially before the cutting begins. Then, as the plotter receives data for an element that is longer than the pre-feed amount, it will automatically pre-feed more media before cutting that element so that the vinyl is pre-grooved and the rolling resistance is minimized. So you get the benefit of the auto pre-feed throughout the 30 foot plotting process even without pre-feeding 30 feet of vinyl.  Even if you’re not an Austin Powers fan, you've got to admit...that’s pretty groovy.