amancue said:
the issue on paper I read here
http://melspapercraft.weebly.com/us-letter-paper.html and several other locations
Yep, that is the issue. The people that have trouble with it do so because they don't understand what the root cause is. That's unfortunate, because it's actually really simple...
The CraftROBO (despite where it's sold) was originally designed for the UK, and A4 paper. Here are the sizes of paper compared (from
http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/):
Millimetres Inches
Width Length Width Length
A4 210.0 297.0 8.26 11.69
Letter 215.9 279.4 8.50 11.00
So letter paper is about 6mm taller, and 17mm narrower. The CraftROBO's default settings are to look for the registration marks where they would be if you stuck A4 paper in. When you switch to letter, you need to tell it to print the marks in a different magin-width from the edge, so that they end up lining up under the "eye" correctly. So when you add some extra margin to the bottom, to compensate for the longer paper, you get the 32mm. And when you take away some margin from the sides, you end up with the 15mm/10mm. (The settings are a little off of what you would calculate. I suspect it happened because people were doing it by trial-and-error, instead of root cause analysis. The calculated numbers will actually work too, and I've tried them. Either way, they are close enough for the "eye" to initially find them and compensate from there. I think all other sources just read it on Mel's site, found it worked, and repeated the info.)
Mel's settings...
Top: 25mm
Bottom: 32mm
Left: 15mm
Right: 10mm
You can actually put the marks almost anywhere, and manually adjust where it is looking for them too. This can be useful if you're trying to use odd sized paper, like a greeting card.
I got my CraftROBO in the US, online. I should have clarified that by saying it was not sold in the US, I meant that there are no retail chains that carry them in stores (that I could find). You can find the US versions, the Wishblade and Silhouette, at a number of popular US retail stores though.
The biggest problem I've had, which is an issue with all the currently available makes/brands/models of consumer cutters, is that the cutting area is significantly smaller than the paper (and the printable area). So a lot of the unfolds available here really push the pieces to the edges, and you need to do a lot of work moving them to new sheets to spread them out, and even breaking down some of the larger pieces.
Another odd inconvenience is that there is no Pepakura DESIGNER for CraftROBO, just the Viewer. You can only see the registration marks in the Viewer, but can only move/separate pieces in Designer. So you need to own both, and have them both open, and you play this stupid game moving it in Designer, then opening it up in Viewer to see if it fits in the marks, and going back and forth.
One final thought is about carrier sheets. Most of the machines available, including CraftROBO, claim to have cutting capabilities that are 7-8" wide and up to 24-30" long. So you might think "Cool, I can just cut on legal size cardstock!" Wrong (at least at first). The machines all use an adhesive carrier sheet, but they companies only sell carrier sheets long enough for letter/A4 type papers. They expect that if you are cutting longer things, you'll be using sign-vinyl, which needs no carrier sheet because it has its own backing. I've been wanting to try making my own larger carrier sheets, which you can find tutorials/descriptions of online, using some backing material and removable spray adhesive.
Hope this helps
