Carlson Design believes in simplicity.  Fewer moving parts means more reliability, less complexity, and more up-time.  For this reason, we favor static tables, sized to the average job length.  Conveyor are not without purpose, and are ideal where production facility square footage is prohibitively expensive (IE large city) even still, you can often build lofted or mezzanine static production tables to adapt to most layouts.  Again, Simple = Reliable.  Quick List of Pro’s and Cons:

Static Table Pros/Cons:

Pros:  Low Cost, smaller vacuum blowers, affordable cutting surface (avg $250), No moving parts, last forever, easy to assemble, simple

Cons:  Require manual material advancement, large foot print

Conveyor Table:

Pros:  Small foot print, automatically advance material, Ideal where floor space is $$$

Cons:  Complicated, expensive initial investment, expensive/large vacuum blowers required, very expensive cutting surface ($2-4k) needs to be replaced regularly, moving parts require service and maintenance, more complicated software.

Conveyor and Static tables operate at comparable cutting speeds.   Typically load and unload times cause production times on a conveyor table to nominally more efficient and significantly less efficient if down time occurs from table malfunction.

We offer a Cloth Advancement system that mounts on our larger plotter/cutter models for advancing the material after each cut.  This is designed as an operator convenience and not to create a “lights-out-factory”.  All tables, 0conveyor or static, require an operator.

For jobs larger than your static table, Carlson Design offers its “Virtual Table” software.  See the video above for a demo on how it allows you to easily plot/cut patterns larger than your vac table.  Simply break the file into multiple, “virtual tables” and manually advance your material after each run.

For more questions about vacuum tables, please contact Carlson Design!