[rescue] Any interest in an ImageWriter I?

[Robert Slover]

I gave away a nice, older HP plotter last year to another list member.  
While researching it a little to see if one could still get pens and 
things for it (yes), I discovered some people had done an interesting 
hack: outfitted the plotter with a swivel knife for cutting adhesive 
vinyl for sign making, automotive decals, etc.  Some guys were making 
decent money on the side doing custom lettering for rear car windows, 
etc.  If I had thought of that, the plotter probably wouldn't have 
spent so many lonely disused years in my attic.

I have no idea why the thought never occurred to me.  I had helped a 
friend set up a sign shop years before, and his first vinyl cutter was 
a plotter originally designed for cutting denim material for making 
blue jeans.  It spoke HPGL.  For layout, he was using CorelDraw on 
Windows 3.1 at the time, and I wrote a bunch of batch programs for 
scaling up the HPGL output to the appropriate size (CorelDraw would 
only output 30"x30" at the max then).  Now he has a nice Ioline sign 
plotter, but at one point he also used an ordinary HP wide-format 
plotter he bought at a local college equipment auction.

The HP plotter I gave away had "stone" feed wheels, which could really 
grip the paper, and ought to last forever.

--Robert

On Apr 9, 2007, at 4:07:36 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 02:41:57AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
>
>> The last time I dealt with a "plotter", it was really nothing more 
>> than
>> a wide-format-paper HP inkjet printer.  I've not seen one that 
>> actually
>> used separate pens in *years* (e.g., since about 1990-91 or so, back 
>> in
>> the days of Gateway '386 systems and AutoCAD..)
>
> I have an HP one, I got a few years ago when I thought I was going to
> actually build hardware (ca 2003). It has feed problems, which probably
> can be easily fixed, but I haven't used it, so I did not fix it. It 
> does
> produce really nice output though, but so does a modern inkjet.
>
> It will produce an 11X17 inch plot much bigger than any of the printers
> I have.

... cut ...

> I have a few pens for it, but buying a set of new pens from the U.S. 
> or a
> new set of feed rollers will cost more than a decent high resolution
> inkjet printer.

... cut ...