What Is Wrong With You? Setting Up My New Roland VG2-540

[Music] so my garage has been the location for a ton of videos on this channel over the years we've done a lot of bike stuff in there working on bikes building bikes done cool videos with friends in there I think I even did some videos just sprucing that place up in general building it into the garage that you see today well now it's time for this to take its next step in evolution as I mentioned in a few videos we're looking for space to move rogue lab into right now and that has been an absolute nightmare for me to see at least I won't even get into it because I could pretty much be its own video I've got a bunch of stories to tell when it comes to that but the business is continually growing and there are certain things that we need to keep up with that growth and I can't keep stalling it anymore I can't keep waiting until we move into a new space so I'm just gonna keep using the space that I have available and we're gonna do something with this so I got to work and started tearing stuff apart in there the first thing that had to go was my sand blaster and powder coat spray booth that was a sacrifice I had to make kind of sucks but that's possibly the messiest thing that I could have ever had in that garage and then I had to spend three straight days cleaning up afterwards cleaning all the dust that got into every little square inch of that place and build up over the last eight or nine years whatever it's been yeah it was not fun I also ended up sacrificing pretty much all my motorcycle spare parts that have collected over the years and some of my other beloved tools that part kind of sucked too but again it's a sacrifice that I needed to make I am 100% dedicated to this business and making it grow making it work so sometimes you got to let some stuff go but after three straight days of cleaning my ass off in there this place is as clean as organized and a space efficient as its ever been before I seriously went to the extent of wiping down every single item in there and if you have any idea what I have in there you know that was not easy to do but it had to be a completely clean and dust free environment because we got some new equipment coming today now a lot of you are probably thinking that an automated press would be the next logical step in the business which it kind of is we definitely need one because I'm printing way more than one person ever should but again short on space I don't want to move the printing out of the house and out of the spot that it's in right now so that's out until we get a new spot but since day one since this crazy idea popped into my head I've always wanted rogue lab to be a business that can do anything for our clients I want to have everything in-house that can do whatever they need and actually I'm pretty sure I talked about that way back in the first video when I announced that I was gonna start rogue lab so we started off with the heat transfer stuff like most do moved into the screen printing and then for the last year and a half I've been busting absolute ass on that trying to get good at it build up our client base and just keep putting out quality work and that's been working really well for us so now it's time to expand into another market we're getting a wide format printer well I can't even begin to tell you I've wanted one of these things for so damn long they're so cool that can make so much cool ship stickers vehicle wraps banners but list those things can make is super long it's actually kind of impressive I threw all that stuff over the last few days and there's way more out there than I even knew about there's gonna be a lot for me to learn in a very short amount of time I definitely anticipate myself making a lot of mistakes and whatever and that's just that's just part of learning you got to do it to figure out the right way to do things but I'm ready for it I'm ready to dropkick this challenge in the chest this printer is set to show up here in probably like the next 5-10 minutes [Music] well this is gonna be another one of those moments where we talk about things not going very well because they're not going very well so we're now a little over six hours into the setup process of this thing which really should have been very very quick and very easy to do and this thing hasn't so much as spit out one drop of ink yet and that's because of the serious lack of compatibility with Mac products I don't know what it is with this industry with screen printing it seems to be like this with the embroidery side that seems to be like this I've been researching that lately and with this I didn't think it was gonna be an issue but apparently it is that companies just don't support Mac stuff and this isn't just some surprise thing that popped up either this is something that I brought up numerous times in the purchasing of this thing that we are on Mac machines here myself and all my guys were on Mac stuff and that's that I was assured yep no problems we'll be up and running in no time it's not a big deal well the first problem is that first it works the rip software for this thing is not Mac compatible whatsoever zero nothing and they have no plans to even make it Mac compatible so that's pretty ridiculous they do have a Mac version of their software apparently as from what I can find online but as I was told today as this was being set up is that's not even available anymore for whatever reason so there's that there is however a third-party rip software that's designed to work with this printer and work with Mac but the downside of that is its third-party so you kind of lose some support along the way you have to fill little gaps here and there yourself and troubleshoot a lot which is something that I'm not super scared of I'm somewhat smart I think sometimes but still there's gonna be those like odd times where you need help and that's it's a little dicey but the big thing for me on that is that software is $3,200 like it is stupid stupid money and I can tell you I am paying for it so then the next logical step was to install parallels on my Mac that way I can run Windows on there not a big deal got that going got the versa works installed on there seemed like things we're gonna be good to go and then it came to the wireless setup of this thing and yeah tech couldn't seem to figure that out alright so the wireless doesn't work let's hardwire this thing it has no USB out at all the only external cable this thing has is Ethernet and I haven't seen an Ethernet port on a laptop in I don't know five six years they don't they don't make them anymore because you don't need them but I also dropped this lens space first on the concrete by the way so it's all kind of broken it's still working but still that did not feel good dropping a two thousand dollar lens and watching pieces scatter across the floor it's been the most stressful day I've had in a very long time I'm gonna say that man it's tough you know like worked so hard for this work every single day for the last year and a half whatever it's been since this started like I just non-stop going and going and going I've been taking a day off I think I've taken like four days off period since this started trying to make stuff like this happen I've been dreaming about this day for so long and the day finally comes and just rain up shits Creek so as of right now I own a really expensive paper plate the plan for tomorrow is he's coming back again he had a computer with him here today that he couldn't get set up on there either for whatever reason so he's coming back with another one I also have two contingency plans for myself I have a PC that's like fully Specht out a laptop that's got pretty much everything that you could get in it I bought it to run the will flex ink mixing software that I use for my screen printing stuff because again that's only PC compatible but of course it being a laptop there's no Ethernet port on it because we live in 2020 and we don't need them so yeah I got a USBC Ethernet adapter that will work on that and my Mac showing up tomorrow morning so that way I've got two fail-safes here and zero zero excuses that can happen when it comes to setting this thing up I want to see this thing dancing like a damn ballerina tomorrow and spitting out cool otherwise the other game plan is to get it the hell out of here real fast and yeah I'll just get something different because when he dumped tens and tens of thousands of dollars into some equipment you expect that to work beautifully and I've not experienced any of that so far I guess on the bright side if we're gonna try and glass-half-full anything laminator works fine it's a big old analog unit no problems there turning on works like a charm so at least something here works but I don't have anything cool put in there so it's pretty much the paper way - all right I got to get out of here before my anger level climbs anymore I've been stuff and that this whole time so that I can talk like a regular rational human being I can assure you when this thing turns off its gonna be an entirely different story so uh let's continue this on tomorrow [Music] so update number two I really didn't film a lot today at all because I wanted to focus on getting this goddamn thing running finally and what we kind of did things started to look up we got it spitting out prints from his computer so that was cool we know that the printer is actually working I eventually got boot camp and windows and all that stuff running on my computer which was pretty dicey to say the least it had a lot of issues with that we could not get it working on there somebody had to access my computer remotely from roland set some stuff on there and finally it started to work so at that point I was like almost excited so I was like alright let's start testing some stuff out to see what the workflow is like and whatever and that's where things just just went super wrong and I got really really sour about it so first of all of boot camp I'm sure a lot of you know if you brown boot camp on a Mac before you've got a restart every single time you switch back and forth between the two hence the name boot camp so whatever I am enough putting parallels on my computer to avoid that well that would not allow any of this other stuff to work so that had to be cut out of the equation so I spent you know 170 bucks on that for nothing and then there was like all kinds of weird stuff going on there's a lot of like IP address stuff and DNS setting stuff that goes back and forth between these two that have to be manually set even though it's got a hardwired connection got to work and whatever and by the end of this like the workflow was crazy like for me to print out one sticker it took about like I don't know five six minutes to go back and forth between all the stuff get the file jump back into Windows put the file in there set things up blah blah like just something that should have taken me three seconds took way way longer than it needed to so it's already kind of pissed off about that but then I was like man we've been doing a lot of really weird messing around here and it seems a very very fragile and I don't like that I don't feel good about it and so I just kind of like you know just let's check something out real quick and I restart my computer and sure enough it wiped all that work that we did away clean and it would not connect to my computer again he tried his computer again and it wouldn't connect to that one either and I actually managed to get a demo of that third-party software out of the company that makes it the kind that runs on Mac between these things and that was supposed to kind of fix all the problems well that wouldn't connect to it either and also that software for being $3,000 plus is it's so good that user interface it looks like it was made in 1998 so cat so finally after like five more hours of sitting around with our thumbs and our asses I finally just told the dude like let's call time of death on this thing it is what it is this is not gonna work this machine let's get this thing out of here I don't want it anymore and it sucks because like again I've dreamed of holding puppies for a long before rogue Lab existed and to have it go this badly just it's it's eaten away but I've been sitting here for like an hour reflecting on all these failures and I just I can't go out like that man I just I can't it'll drive me crazy I won't be able to sleep for a week so I'm making a last-ditch effort here as I mentioned before I do have a PC laptop so I'm gonna set that up out here now the guy took all his stuff with him he had like all the software on USB Drive but I dug around in those boxes and I actually found the software comes on a disk like in 2020 they're still giving out these with this big-ass expensive printer it's unbelievable nothing has a disk drive anymore so I send someone out to get me a disk drive to be able to play the goddamn things I'm cute and there it is hopefully that will allow me to at least successfully install the software onto that PC and hopefully somehow make something work out of this by the end of this I'm gonna be a rollin tech or there's gonna be a flaming hot pile of in the garage [Music] holy I think it's connected oh my god I need the USB Drive I gotta get the clouds going tell me they're gonna work I hear this thing making noise give it to me print something holy Oh Frank dick really what I did was I factory reset this thing said started over from scratch again and I got it working on the first crack like come on I'm gonna shut this thing down and restart it and just to make sure nothing real crazy happens but I think we got something here yes yeah two days of messing around being pissed off and having the worst time ever and like 20 minutes of being by myself with this thing and that's the main battle taking care of now so that's a good thing next thing I got to figure out is getting the color is in the resolution everything just to look sharper I've got everything set to the max settings right now as far as resolutions concern the color just it's not there for me all right so I've printed out a bunch of different tests I think I found a color profile that I like it's still not exactly what I'd like it to be I'd like more dense more vibrancy just more everything but for now I found one that actually kind of works and I think what I'm gonna do to test things out is I've got my existing rogue lab stickers here that I got made by somebody else before I got this printer so I want to see if I can replicate that if I can replicate that then I know this thing can do what I want it to do it just keeps on coming so I've tried a bunch of these things I've printed off probably like 15 test prints the print quality is just it's not there it's it's to be honest with you the colors are not dense they're not solid the black is really really grainy just across the board it just doesn't look good at all and at this point I've tried all the different color profiles all the quality settings a whole bunch of different stuff whatever the stock stuff had to offer and well none of it's working so at this point I think I gotta give up on that at least cuz I'm just gonna sit here in test print all day and get the same result so I think what I'm gonna do is wait until tomorrow and call Roland or start calling around some other people that maybe have these things and try to figure out how I can get this thing to print nice dense solid color I expected to be a lot further ahead than this especially having someone come in and set me up properly and yeah turns out that wasn't the case and I ran the show here to get as far as we're at now so to be continued all right we're on day three now it's been a journey to say the least so where we ended off last night I had the sink running perfect no issues whatsoever with connectivity I tried reboot I tried messing around with stuff as much as I possibly could to create a problem no problems there awesome but the print quality coming out of this thing was just it was horrible it's so bad it's something I would never sell to anybody it just looked like I went through I don't know I probably spent six hours or so going through all the different color profiles and tweaking settings and just trying everything that I possibly could to make this thing print out a clean image and I got it like yeah maybe 60% of the way to where I would need it to be but definitely nowhere near a professional level so I spend a whole bunch of time cruising around the internet trying to find a solution to this problem try to find there's some setting somewhere that I'm missing or or what is it well after all that I kind of was able to narrow it down to the printhead itself something to do with printhead alignment or calibration or something there's like 20-something adjustments in this head alone that obviously dictate how well this thing prints so I ripped off a bunch more test prints I called that same guy this morning he was gonna come down here again was like oh we'll get that thing running today is like actually no sorry I did that myself thank you but this thing's still printing like and he's like well no it's that's just the way it looks and that's that and I'm just like no absolutely not there's no way that anyone who's using one of these is letting these kind of print slides it's just it's terrible looks so bad they're just full of grain none of the colors were solid the blacks were just grainy as all hell it just it was a really ugly print like it couldn't even keep up with my little hundred dollar HP sitting on my desk right now so after that I was like well get this piece of out of ten because I don't want it I'll get something else and that's kind of where that left off but thankfully a friend of mine who works with these things just like to try something else try a different tech let's see if we can solve this problem because it sounds like it's something very simple and something that can be fixed so I was like all right let's give it one more shot so a super top secret ninja tech who works on these things helped me out today and men the calibration and all the adjustments and stuff that are supposed to be done during install on this thing he said we're hilariously out of whack like it wasn't even close to where it needs to be so we got that thing dialed in a bunch first test print that came out of it was literally like miles miles better not even close to what was coming out of it the day before and he was really helpful I'm explaining of how these calibrations are done and what they do exactly and I was better able to understand just how bad this thing was but like when he saw her was that he literally laughed so yeah thanks to that awesome person this thing is now printing beautifully and his problem frickin so I think it's gonna stay here I still got some to deal with with the other company that I got this thing from because clearly I'm not happy with them whatsoever and the way this whole thing went down is just so so bad I kind of had a feeling the whole way through this that this guy really didn't know what he was doing clearly cuz I was here for two days just trying to get this thing to print and nothing was happening so yeah my suspicions were confirmed I'll say that much I'm gonna try and hold in my rage insults right oh yeah I think this thing's gonna stay like it's printing pretty awesome right now there's still a little bit of a head adjustment needed like not enough that you're really gonna notice it by eye but you guys know how I am I want that extra little 1% advantage if I can get it and I just got to do some around try and get my warranty moved over to somewhere else so that I can get a different tech to come here to operate this thing and we'll get that squared away and knock out some sweet but it's still operating at like 99.5% which is awesome and I'm gonna print some stuff for myself first just to kind of get the hang of things I still have to learn how to use that laminator by the way I have no instruction about that yeah that's gonna be a whole other thing but let's print something off real quick before we end this thing off let's print out a real big-ass robe lab like obviously it's gonna have to be blue because everything in here is red and blue apparently this vinyl is good for for graphics let's give us a big for logo oh okay you have no idea how good this feels I've been stressing so bad for the last couple days I've barely slept in like three days now and yeah tonight I'm gonna sleep like goddamn baby because that's some good stuff right there we gotta let this chill and out gas for a while what that means is it's a solvent ink so solvent drives by evaporation so we're gonna let all the get out of there before we laminate this thing and stick it down to the floor so I think this is gonna be a two-part video plus in the next day or so we're gonna have a couple more things rolling in here Tony's been hard at work building us some really cool vinyl racks and a super sick work table so that's gonna roll in here plus I should probably take the time to figure out how to work that laminator before I gem thing through it or Jam my fingers or something worse through so yeah I'm gonna do that well the band's feel so good not only to have this working obviously but working so hard for so long to get one of these things in here now that I can finally have one here it's like it's it's almost surreal like we just hit another big milestone and now that it is here I'm gonna be doing some real killer with it anyways I got to get this whole mess that I've made throughout this place cleaned up it was so sparkling clean three days ago when this started and this is really bothering me now so part number two of getting this whole operations set up and running coming up next we'll see you in the next one my exposure looks like can't see the screen and I just swallowed a bug oh here wasabi well it's like instant I can breathe better than I've ever been able to do my entire life I can smell for miles there's a reason why I haven't touched anything Windows since like 2008 cuz I hate it so much everything about it 13 hours out of yourself farts right I don't think there's really gonna be any outtakes in this video because nothing funny has happened at all it's just been me being really angry the whole time and then no one wants to watch that [Music]

Channel: Lee Stuart

Views: 29,097

Rating: 4.7394843 out of 5

Keywords: lee stuart, leestuart38, lee stuart 38, lee stewart, what is wrong with you?, roland vg2-540, roland vg2 printer, roland vg2 640, roland vg2 reviews, roland truevis vg2, wide format printer, wrap printing, wrap printer for cars, vinyl wrap printing machine, vinyl wraps, sticker printer, sticker printing, sticker printer and cutter, sticker printing at home, sticker printer for business, roland vg2 set up, roland dg, roland dga support

Id: DU4VCNWsme8

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020