Calibrating a Oce TDS400

I am trying to help another office get the Oce TDS400 to work properly. We
are having a problem where the plots are not coming out to scale. The person
in that office that has the most experience with the plotter says the
calibration settings on the plotter are not fine enough for the calibration
that needs to be done. He thinks we need to calibrate the PC3 file instead
of the plotter. The issue I have with this is that some people are starting
to use Microstation so their plots won't have the calibration applied to
them. Has anyone had success calibrating an Oce TDS400? I am not familiar
with Oce plotters. We have the service technician to the calibration on the
Xerox plotter in my office.

We are using AutoCAD 2002, but will be upgrading to 2004 soon.

Thanks
Tom

 

How far out is it %-wise ? The spec is 0.3% I think.

Check the custom properties that you don't have a scale factor (other than 100%) set.

The machines a pretty accurate. Your oce engineer can calibrate the system usign the internal diagnostics pretty quickly. Remember paper is not a very stable media to scale from.

 

The plotter is off about 1/16" over 8". We are trying to get 22x34 sheets to
plot correctly on a 34" roll and 24x36 sheets to plot correctly on a 36"
roll. We have modified the shift offsets to get the plots to appear on the
paper in the veritical direction, but there is still a horizontal shift. Now
that we have the veritical shift set, we get either 22" or 24" of paper, but
we still see the outside border, which should be where the plotter cuts the
paper. We have several other Oce plotters and Xerox plotters and can get
plots from them that are a lot closer in scale than what this machine is
giving us. Before we mess with the horizontal shift settings, we want to
make sure the calibration is set properly.

usign the internal diagnostics pretty quickly. Remember paper is not a very
stable media to scale from.

 

Ask a Oce Engineer to calibrate your plotter first.
You should get some sample plot indicating that the plotter is calibrated to its specification from the Oce Engineer.
If you didn't get any sample plot test file of the machine, by all mean ask for it.
Oce machine have a Registration Standard Guideline for accuracy and the Oce Engineer must fulfill this standard when calibrating the machine.

After calibration then you should get an accurate scale with only a very minor differences due to the expansion and shrinking of the printing media cause by the heating needed to fuse the toner. Nevertheless it should conform with the machine accuracy standards.

You shall not need to adjust the vertical/horizontal shift for plotting. Just make sure you tick/set the option center on drawing and set the paper media size/width correctly in the plotter media setting(machine) and media source and size in the plotter configuration editor(AutoCad). You should also read the Oce HDI driver setting documentation inside Autocad help file.