No more taping plans together for me!

[jhitesma]

I'm still just in shock that you found such a great score so quickly I knew about mine for two months before I was able to get it and it was killing me that whole time worrying whether or not I'd actually get it!

To score a 36" color setup that was just suffering from bad ink on such short notice...you must be living right!

 

[willsonman]

I dont know about living right but I have had many instances in this hobby where I have had great people just give me stuff. My Tx, and a top flite 60 corsair are just a couple.

When the black cartridge came it had ink on the outside of the cartridge. I contacted Amazon and they gave me a refund and said if I re-ordered they would give overnight shipping for free. LOVE Amazon CS. Sometimes it really pays to be a prime member.

 

[willsonman]

Well, I went to print my first real set of plans last night. Kind of a bust. I had the printer all set up and it printed fine on a sheet of paper. Did all my calibrations right. Then I fed the roll in. I got the baby blender plans out on pdf and I had not scaled them right. hit cancel... all is fine. Got the scaling right and got the second page. Then cartridge fits. Fiddled for an hour while cutting some ribs for another project and finally gave up. I dont know whats up with it. Still do not have all good cartridges. Maybe that's the next step.

 

[willsonman]

Finally color inks are on their way! I've also had a thought. I recently purchased plans for a 1/6 Fokker DVIII. They typically use the lozenge camo pattern on the top and bottom wings. I plan on sheeting the wings as that was scale to do. My thought though it to try the classic lozenge pattern but print it onto tissue. You can print onto tissue with regular inkjets if you back it with a light tack glue on paper. I'm thinking this will work on a section of paper and then sheet feed it into the plotter. Application is still tricking me. I'm thinking I could just use OIL-based poly rather than water... 2 reasons. 1: no wrinkling of the tissue on application. 2: Prevent running of the ink and seal it at the same time of application. Any thoughts?

 

[jhitesma]

Sounds like an interesting idea...I'd be worried about ink running when printing on tissue but with the right settings and some experimentation I could see it working out.

I just finished my first build from plans printed on my 600 - a FT Racer. Can't wait to maiden it this weekend. I also managed to make room in my office and get it out of our dining room which pleased the wife Unfortunately my wifi bridge is flakey so I haven't been able to print to it since I moved it - need to order a new bridge.

 

[willsonman]

Well, I decide to do some investigating. I managed to print off Kay Bengston's lozenge pattern (Aerodrome RC) onto tissue just fine. I wanted to give this the WORST possible scenario. This tissue is cheapo $store stuff that has already been used for gifting. I started off by taking the tissue and using my household iron to flatten it as best I could WITH steam. Stem helped a lot to get rid of the wrinkles. From there I lightly sprayed cardstock with super 77 and honestly that was too much. I printed on my wife's schmancy Epson photo printer ($600) and again on my cheapo HP (think like $50). You can see how much brighter the HP was and that the print had more streaking. The color distribution is much better on the Epson and I honestly like the colors better. Application of the OIL-based poly was as my normal procedure. I applied one initial coat to the foam board. Then apply the tissue. Then apply a layer over that. When I placed the HP tissue on I noticed that the tissue did not want to un-curl with the poly. So I took the epson one and ironed it before I applied it to get the curl out. I was not anticipating the ink staying very well from the ironing but it worked really well. I had the temp on as hot as it gets and just a couple passes and I was done. Applied the tissue with zero problems.

 

[willsonman]

FINALLY got the last of my new ink today. She runs like a top. Printed off two sets of plans. Printed some color stuff. Need to calibrate the heads for color. Test plate of lozenge is withstanding the cold very well with all this polar vortex weirdness.

 

[willsonman]

Ok, got a shot and a GREAT tip for all those thinking these old PLOTTERS are printers! So check out the picture. I'll explain what is going on. Indeed the old girl can print onto tissue just fine. I have a sheet of foam board drying with lozenge applied. I'll be placing this along with the other plate in the back of my car for some UV exposure to indicate fading effects.

So, this is a PLOTTER. NOT a printer. The code used to communicate is very precise and more geared for CAD drawings. This means VECTORED file formats kids. Anything like a picture that is rasterized is a waste of ink. I had my suspicion on this which is why I ran the test. The left with the AWFUL color is a rasterized version of the SAME file as the right. The right was printed directly from inkscape (Adobe illustrator but free) and the left was printed using the print like it was a windows photo. Running XP here too. So, For those wanting to do these lozenge patterns onto tissue and want to print them using a plotter... you have been warned.

 

[jhitesma]

Yep, they are indeed vector machines at heart even if mechanically they seem like a normal ink jet.

My wife accidentally printed a coupon to mine because she didn't notice which printer was selected. Took about 15 minutes to process the 8.5x11 image and the print out was...as David would say...HORRIBLE!

But feed it some nice vector art and it rocks.

Thankfully the FT plans from PDF rasterize well enough for my needs. But with the foamboard viggen tease that was posted to facebook today I've got to get on the ball about getting my network sorted out! Either need to reconfigure my old DD-WRT router as a bridge or spend the $20 for a dedicated bridge now that I moved the plotter outside.

BTW - I still have this huge 9500hdn laser sitting in my backyard (under cover) and I can't give it away! Two people were almost interested...but they they found out it doesn't have a USB port and really is a network printer designed to only be used over the network and despite them having networks in their homes and offices it scared them off Which seems silly to me because it was hands down the easiest printer I've ever connected to windows since the networking is so well done and "Just works". So if anyone in southwest AZ or southeast CA is looking for a free workhorse of a laser drop me a message...just be warned I'm not helping load it in the truck as I'm still recovering from moving it last time

 

[willsonman]

So I spent some time this past weekend trying to print the vectored lozenge pattern to the correct size. I've never worked in vector programs like inckscape. My wife works in illustrator but she just "knows" how to do things. Its hard for her to explain them. I sized up my print page and re-sized my drawing and am not getting the correct size when I print. Something to work on. Use of the pattern is a long ways off. I still have to START the build of the DVIII. I did try to Print using my cute PDF writer plugin and the vectored PDF looked fine on-screen but printed much different colors. Its SOOOO strange.

 

[jhitesma]

Mine is alive again! A few weeks ago I finally got around to moving it out of the house and into my office. But since I cut down to only working from home one day a week I work from the backroom instead of my office so I re-wired my home network last summer and left my office disconnected. So the plotter has been setup, powered on, and ready to go...but no connection to a computer for the past few weeks.

I had an old linksys router with DD-WRT flashed to it that I was going to use as a wireless bridge...but it's one of the post cisco buyout ones and has a habit of locking up even with DD-WRT. So I put a few minutes into configuring it but quickly decided it was more hassle than it was wroth for a buggy router and I'd be better off just picking up a cheap bridge.

Off to ebay and amazon...finally found one for <$20 that I liked and picked it up off amazon with my free prime shipping this weekend and it arrived yesterday. Tried to get it setup over lunch...but didn't quite get it working.

Got home at the end of the day, spent another 15 minutes reconfiguring it into client mode and resetting the wifi settings...and it works! My plotter is on the network again.

Just in time too...I've been itching to build a FT-22 and with the foamboard viggen coming out soon I know I'm going to need to be printing

 

[JasonEricAnderson]

All this lozenge reminded me of some photos I took at the Smithsonian.

 

[jhitesma]

Ok, this is straying off topic from flight (kind of...I may be able to swing it back that way...) but I discovered another benefit of owning a large format printer this week.

USGS Topos!

My wife and I both LOVE maps, especially USGS topo maps. They're just beautiful and I always find neat things I've passed by many times without realizing were there when I look at one. Back in Ohio there was a store called the backpacker shop that had a whole map room with topos on big boards mounted on hinges so you could look them them all to find the one you wanted - (They also had 3D vacuformed maps of many areas which were even cooler) I used to spend hours there just looking at the maps.

The USGS site is kind of a pain to navigate: http://nationalmap.gov/ustopo/index.html But once you figure it out you can download current and historic topo maps for anywhere in the US free. And they fit almost perfectly on 20x30 D sized prints (You do loose some of the white border but it's just white border so who cares?)

The site is kind of confusing since they call it a "map store" but it's also the portal to download maps for free.

So my wife is no way happier with me owning this beast of a printer since she gets nice big topo maps to enjoy. And now we both want me to find a color one!


Oh - bringing this back to flight...FAA Sectional charts! http://avn.faa.gov/index.asp?xml=aeronav/applications/VFR/chartlist_sect

I haven't had a chance to try printing one yet...but it doesn't look as well suited to my printer as the USGS maps are....we'll see though....

 

[jhitesma]

Yeah, the FAA sectionals are HUGE TIF's...not very good for printing

But in case anyone else is using one of these old deskjets I wanted to share something I learned in the past 24 hours. In the print settings advanced tab there's an option to choose whether to process the print in the printer or in the computer. The default is in the printer and is what I've been using...but Printing a complex topo my printer ran out of memory so I tried the "in computer" option. When I selected it a warning came up that it was much slower and should only be used if "in printer" fails. But I'm thinking that warning is from a time and day when computers were much less powerful. Because for me it actually speeds printing considerably!

Printing my modified Viggen plans reorganized for 20x30 sheets I was getting out of memory errors, blocked up text and missing bits of images with "in printer" selected. But when I switched to "in computer" they came out great and all four pages printed in less time than one page took with it set to "in printer"!

 

[willsonman]

I printed the full set of the Viggen with no issues. Though the plan was loooooong. 126" long. Printed great. I cut it to bits and already have the hard work done. I'm out of town on business this week so I have something to work on in the hotel room at night

 

[jhitesma]

I wish mine would do extra lengths. It seems to only accept sizes it expects. Yours seems a bit more flexible in that regard. Plus I just hate to waste paper even if it is cheap - so re-organizing the parts to fit in less space makes me feel good

 

[willsonman]

Its odd. When I print I have to specify the sheet size. I also have to specify that I am printing at 100%. As long as I indicate that I am using the roll it will allow me to print any length. Printing on sheets it strange. I've not been able to figure out the orientation that it will print first as it seems to change depending on the size of paper I use and keeping protrait/landscape constant.

 

[jhitesma]

I may have to do some more experiments then. I may try the stock viggen plans just to see if it will work on mine. But I've seen mine do really goofy things as far as portrait/landscape (like trying to print a landscape print as portrait even if I had it set as landscape) so I didn't really expect it to be able to print longer than the set sheet sizes even though it's set to roll...I may be wrong and just didn't have my tests setup right.

Bummer is it's a real pain for me to do a lot of tests now since the printer is a physically separate building than all my computers so it's kind of tricky to cancel a print job that goes south now

And even so I'd still prefer my customized prints since they use less paper. But it would be good to know if there is a way I can trick this thing into printing longer than it thinks it can since it is printing on a roll.

 

[willsonman]

Well, I have posted my plotter on craigslist. With all the effort I put into cleaning and refurbishing this machine I hope to get what it is worth. I now have a new-to-me Epson Stylus Pro 9600 with all the fixins.

 

[lorencv]

Lucky!!!