I just bought a Esab silhouette 500 w/ optical tracer and burny 2.5 control I can't get it to trace it starts and then loses the line I tried tracing just a piece of paper and it won't do it I painted the table w/ flat black paint it still doesen't work it keeps losing the line can someone help Thanks Kirk

I believe you need to have the trace printed in fat enough black line on white paper. I dont think that placing a white sheet on a black table will make it trace.

I did that I read somewhere .035 wide it will not work it will work with the paper cutout if it is perfectly flat Thanks Kirk oh I cleaned the optic too

so did you get it going?

No I went to store and got poster board paper it will trace a cutout but will not pickup a line I tried pencil, pen, marker, small marker and it will not even pickup the line seems to trace cutout pretty well though Thanks Kirk

White paper a little heaver than regular paper should work, I have found that computer paper after it is somewhat damp gets almost transparent. The eye won,t read it very well. It should see a line drawn with a sharpie pen.Some pens use a lot of reds in the dye and they don't see this very well. I did a lot of small parts cad drawn and printed on regular paper with a HP printer with a .035 wide line, worked well. (For bigger parts you just tape the sheets together! Crude but effective!)
Also clean the reflective surface behind the bulbs with alcohol, they need to be clean to reflect good.
One more thing, I found after several years the bulbs seemed to get dimmer, I replaced them and it made a big difference.

Hope this helps, Steve

Thanks for the tips I Will try them Kirk

yep you need to print with a laser printer preferably

I'm sure right. we do custom fab and repair work I was hoping to be able to hand draw something and burn it out for repair work Thanks Kirk