Passap Deco card 9a overlaying the Silhouette Studio Designer Edition Plus file printed out (as close as that program can get…)
down the page, you can see the drift starting. some patterns are several pages snapped together in a long line so the drift is a serious issue.
the “main body” of holes are 5mm horizontally on center, and 5.25mm vertically on center
or that was what i was trying for since 5.2 was a little too little, and 5.3 was a little too much, even calipers get cranky when measuring such tiny fractions
You might try running a few calibration tests on your printer.
Issues with paper feed not precisely matching the printhead travel axis could easily account for the slight drift that’s being shown here.
Maybe consider simplifying your test to focus on, and hopefully rule out errors of this nature. If you can determine a reliable percentage, then that can possibly be adjusted within the model. And hopefully SketchUp will have the internal accuracy to scale at such a fine degree should it be necessary.
This is after all an average/standard printer, and not a CAD plotter which is going to factor in and try to account for accuracy throughout the printed cartesian space – with an emphasis and goal of perfectly matched x/y distances on the plots.
Achieving near perfect results is not so easy, even when working with a specialized CAD plotters, and a favorite set of vernier calipers in hand. I’ve done this a number of times and there is usually an element of frustration involved somewhere along the line, if that’s of any comfort to you.
for a nice detailed overview see… laser printer dimensional accuracy? | Tom's Hardware Forum
As a workaround, see if you can implement a centerline approach and work out in both directions from there. Right now you’re starting on one end and moving the array across the entire sheet, with every discrepancy accumulating along the way (from the position of the printers inaccuracies, not SU’s)
Perhaps working from the center of the form. and fudging your distances to both sides will bring you within an acceptable range on your print outs.
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You would probably get a more accurate c/c placing if you measured the length of the whole row or column of circles, and, in SketchUp, used the division method to array them.
Anssi