Engraving Tips

Long Plate Engraving with Vision Engraving Software

There comes a time for every engraver when you are asked to engrave an item larger than the engraving area of your machine. In the past, this could require a complicated setup in the layout software and many tricks with the engraving table to produce the job. In the Vision engraving software, there is very little extra required to layout an oversized job, and the engraving software takes care of the additional steps during engraving automatically. In this article, we will explain the steps required to engrave an oversized plate using the Vision engraving system and Vision software.

These instructions apply to users of the Vision engraving software only. Vision-Pro software users will need to follow a somewhat different procedure due to the more graphical nature of the Vision-Pro software.

What the Software Will Do For You
The Vision software will automatically recognize a plate size that is larger than the engraving area of the table, and automatically go into it's long plate mode when you send the job to the table for engraving. Since all Vision tables offer a front to back pass through capability, the software will automatically rotate wide jobs 90° clockwise to allow the job to fit on the table. This requires that the height of your job be no taller than the width of your engraving table.

The Vision software will automatically break the job up into sections that will fit on the table being used. You will have the opportunity to adjust where the software breaks the job so it does not section the job in the middle of a letter. We will use the vertical (y axis) margin bar to slide the material into position for each section to be engraved. In some cases, it might not be possible to engrave all the lines in the job at the same time without splitting some characters. You can easily engrave some of the lines using the ling plate feature and then reset the material and engrave the remaining lines during a second pass.

A Sample Job
For the following example, we will engrave a 30" x 4.5" sign with 2 lines of text. The job will look like the following:

When you send this job to the engraver by pressing the key and selecting the driver, the following screen will be displayed:

Note the yellow vertical lines that appear on the screen. This is where the Vision software will break the job up. For the job shown above, three separate sections will be engraved. Since you do not want to have the software engrave part of a character during the first placement and the rest during the second placement, you can use the mouse to move these lines to a better location that do not cross a character on the screen. Start by moving the the left break line by clicking (click and release in Vision) the line and moving it to the left until the line does not cross any characters. Click and release the left mouse button to drop the break line at the new location.

You will notice the right break line follows the left line when you move the left break line. This is because the software knows the table size of the engraver you are using and will not let any section be larger than the table engraving area. After moving the left line, do the same for the right break line to complete the long plate setup. The preview screen with the new break locations is shown below.

When the break lines are arranged correctly, click the OK button to continue. The next screen will show you how much the material must be moved to engrave the second and later sections of the job. Note these distances on a scrap of paper for later reference. The section move screen for our sample job is shown below:

When placing the material on the engraving table, the lower left corner of the material (as the job is displayed) is placed against the margin bars at the upper left corner of the engraving table. In other words, the job is rotated 90° clockwise and placed on the table. The software will send out the job in sections, pausing between each section to allow you to move the material between sections. To make this move easier, lower the horizontal (x axis) margin bar so the material can be slid up to engrave the remaining sections.

After the first section is engraved, the engraver will return to the home position and turn on the Start light on the controller. I usually use a small piece of masking tape on the edge material along the vertical margin at the location indicated in the dialog. Put a mark on the left edge of the material by the vertical margin bar at the location specified in the section move dialog (10.989" for our example). Obviously, we will not be moving the material this accurately, but measure carefully for best results. Next move the material so the mark you placed on the tape is at the table origin (0 on the vertical ruler). When the material is placed at the new position, press the Start button on the controller to engrave this section of the job.

Repeat this procedure for any remaining sections of the job. This will allow you to engrave jobs of almost any length as long as it will fit under the spindle of the engraver.

When you have more than a few lines of text in the job, it can be impossible to position the break lines so that the break lines do not bisect any characters or graphics. The best way to handle this is to temporarily delete some of the lines so you can position the break lines correctly. This way you can run the long plate several times until the entire job is engraved. The best way to delete the lines is to remove the text from the line using the command to clear the text from the main layout screen. Do not delete the lines; just remove the text from the screen. This way you will not disturb the position of any lines in your layout.