lines appear on engraved bmp

[SHADOW042]

Hi guys

Been away with workload

Ive had brought myself an m500 redsail machine
It was working fine but have had a problem appear and cant work out what i did
I was playing in my very little spare time over dec/christmas and now i get a line appear in the raster i engrave (lots of changes not much time and forgot what i did DOH!!!!!!!!). It is at a 45 degree angle and appear every 10mm at 300 dpi when i change it to 150dpi the gap doubles so I dont believe its a hardware problem or it would be uniform and not change with dpi
I have been doing a few mirror and have had a bit of dust appear so ill clean up the machine again but not sure if its a software setting in the easycut 5.1 software im using or something else
Has anyone had this problem b4 ??

Shadow

[MonoNeuron]

Hi Shadow,
I had a similar type of problem but a little bit different but the folks at Solustan gave me a good and simple test to try and find out what was going on.
I thought my problem was software too and I had a ghost image about 2mm offset from the original engraving.
It turned out my X axis was too tight and I had a slightly loose pulley on the drive motor which moved every time the direction changed. because it was at 300 dpi it looked like a ghost but in actual fact it was alternating lines starting and stopping at different places. You can see if it is hardware of you reduce the lines per inch on the engraving to 20 then try that.
Here is the email they sent me on what to do. very helpful to know and simple to do.

Quote "

5. Create a rectangle, may be 100 mm wide by 50 mm high.

6. Unfill, hairline, and send it as vectors with low power to etch the surface of the material. Do not disturb the material.

7. Fill the same rectangle with black fill. Select 20 DPI (very low) and send the job as raster. Please, note that the lines start and end exactly at the boundaries of the rectangle etched in the vector mode. LinkMotion rasters in both directions. If you find that alternate lines either extend or not reach the boundaries drawn in the vector mode on alternate side (one line may extend on one side while the next line extend on the opposite side, etc.), you may have found problems. Problems could be;
- Noise in the steps signals.
- Play in the X axis when changing the direction, typically known as backlash

Hopefully, the above steps may reveal additional information to help you to clean up your system.

Thanks and regards.

Support Team
End Quote "

I hope it gives you a bit more ammo to try and work things out.
Regards
Rich.