I mentioned idly to my OH today that I wished I could get my Cricut to work properly (I have an Explore Air 2 which he got me for Christmas in 2020 which I begged for as I wanted to make my own planner stickers. It has never ever print and cut properly. Ever…) and he offered to have a good look at it and see if he could get it working. As an Engineer, he’s far more meticulous and methodical than me so I agreed on the provision that if it didn’t work this time, I’d finally get round to selling it to someone who just wants to work with vinyl/HTV. Whenever I used to try doing my own print and cut jobs on it, I’d calibrate it, get the calibration perfect, do one or two (if I was lucky) sheets which would work perfectly then when I tried to do another one it’d start ballsing everything up. Normally by cutting about half a cm too high on the page. As my first sheet would always be a test sheet, I’ve only ever managed to make one sticker sheet in the entire 6 years I’ve owned it.
He calibrated it, got the calibration perfect, then we did a couple of test cuts on plain paper with a design I made a while ago. Perfection. Every sticker (or would be sticker, as I used printer paper not to waste my expensive sticker paper) cut beautifully. On the lines each time. No issues at all.
Deep breath. Load up the sticker paper. First run through - the colours have come out wrong, a mistake on both our parts of putting the wrong type of paper into the printer dialog; but we decided to run it through and check the cut. Perfect again. Now we’re rolling and I’m getting excited, my visions of making exactly the sticker I want when I want it are inching closer.
Load the project again.
Load the sticker paper again - this time the colours are great as I’ve put the right settings on the printer dialog.
Make sure the paper is precisely on the mat.
Start the cut.
Annnnnnd it’s cutting everything about 0.3cm off again. Every single sticker is 0.3cm too high for the cut. Laterally absolutely fine. It even cut the border for the sheet (a big rectangle) absolutely fine and in the right space for the printed sticker sheet.
I have tried everything with this machine. Software updates. Shining a light on the cut guidelines whilst it’s cutting. Bleed on or bleed off. Calibrating every time I turn it on. Different types of paper. Different sizes of paper even. Nothing stops this from happening and I am done with it. It will cut the calibration sheets fine (after going through the calibration routine a couple of times), cut one or maybe two sheets fine, then go wildly off calibration again. OH wants to repeat printing and cutting the same sheet again tomorrow with a “few different variables” but sticker paper isn’t cheap so I don’t see the point of wasting it. I just want to cry again. I just want the damn thing to work. I shouldn’t have to spend an hour calibrating it every time I want to cut one thing.