Etching Diagonal

[Robin Bernstein]

Help!
I work for a company where we etch glass, wood and acrylic. Our etching machine is an Epilog 30 Watt which we have had for about a 1.5 years.
We use Adobe Illustrator CC to create and send the artwork.

The art is etching diagonally. The catch is, it doesn't always happen.I haven't noticed this on glassware, just on the wood crates we etch.

Over the holidays, our etching machine was put through its paces. We have never etched so many products before.
This diagonal issue is random, so I'm not able to establish a pattern.

When we place the box in our machine it is flush (or as flushed as can be) to the back and left side of the bed. We are always careful not to push back to hard as it's not exactly flat against the walls. But we know it's not diagonal.

Our settings: 25 S/100 P/600 dpi/Jarvis. We enter a piece size and select center/center and auto focus. It etches fine, it's just etching diagonally.

We set the artwork up and it is flipped upside down to etch, but there is no other rotation in the art file that would be causing this to be tilted. This was one of the first things I looked at.

I have attached some images. We use a tester box and you can see (It says "Lisa's Vineyard" you can see the tilt of the artwork - the other one is a finished piece.

I have spoken to Epilog tech support about this issue we are having.. They think it's the artwork or somehow it's being corrupted when we send it.

Has anyone experienced this?

Thank you in advance for your help!!

[Dave Sheldrake]

I hate illustrator with a passion due to issues like this. It's got to the stage I won't accept Illustrator files from customers any longer.

[Kev Williams]

My old ULS way back when would do that. Turns out the right side Y-axis drive rod was loose. Sometimes it would track fine, other times the left side would move some, until the right drive rod would bind in the cog and finally start moving... the result was exactly like yours, only on mine the right side was higher than the left...

[Mike Null]

I had an issue like that with my old Universal and it was caused by the x-axis shaft being loose and out of alignment. This two piece shaft ran the length of the x axis and should have homed on the stops at the front of the machine (the 12" mark in the y axis) but only the left side was snug hence, my result was like yours but opposite.

[Brian Lamb]

I would question if the box itself is square. In your description you say you place the "box" to the left and back side. Is the box assembled or are you doing just the fronts? If assembled, from the slight tilt I'm seeing in the pictures, I suspect your bases are not exactly square end to end.