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Wacom Graphire III touble

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#1

I’m having major malfunctions with my Wacom Graphire 3 tablet. It has worked for several years now without any problems at all, but this last week it has started acting weird.

So what’s happening is that when I hover the pen above the tablet, the tablet thinks I’m pressing the pen down, making the PC think I’m holding down the left mouse button constantly, even though the pen isn’t even touching the tablet. If I take the pen away, it’s as if I let the button go. This is extremely annoying, and it’s not possible to use it for anything at all. What might cause this problem? Sometimes if I use the button on the pen to which I have assigned double-clicking to double-click on something, the problem is solved (sometimes not, though), but it comes back again if I take the pen far enough away from the tablet for it to not respond to movement. When I’m in Photoshop and ZBrush the problem is different, because pen pressure still works. If I draw something, then want to use another tool or want to use a shortkey to do something, the pen has to be removed from the tablet yet again for it to work. So if I draw something without removing the pen for some time, and I remove the pen to press ctrl+z to undo something I did, everything I did without removing the pen will be undone in one move, as if I did it all in one brushstroke. So my tablet isn’t usable at all, and it annoys me to no end.

Please help me!

#2

While I have not had your specific problem I have had erratic pen behaviour in the past. All I had to do was remove the tip from the pen and clean out the inside as well as the tip. The tip was pretty gooey after 3 years of use with the occasional spilled drink.

If you are lucky your Graphire 3 pen can be seperated into 2 pieces so you can pull out the electronics and clean any dirt that catches your eye. You should not clean the electronics but rather the area and hole where the pen tip slots into.

If you cannot seperate the pen (like with my Intuous 1) you remove the pen tip with the included tip tool. Clean the tip and see if you can see any dirt where the tip should go. You can also use a set of pliers to remove the tip but be careful when applying pressure as you are using a set of pliers to remove something small and made of plastic. Hopefully you got some spare tips when you got your tablet.

Thats all I can think of. The Wacom site has some forums that might help you better.

Good luck.

#3

i totally agree with tiny
one thing ifound with the graphire is the nips and the surface
my old graphire has a plastic cover for tracing and i found alot of my kids junk
in there…a good cleaning and a new tip/nib
wacom will replace
Is there an alternative to a wacom tablet?
I just lift up that tracing cover and clean it with my lense cleaner
cept I know when my tip is sounding gritty…
and I have to wake up and spend some cash…
Please let me say/ that the money and time i spend buying the right oil paint
the right canvas / making the strecthers/2b pencils/Hbs/Charcoals/
papers/etcetera/plus learn english/I want a 6 by 8 intuos 3/when they/get the bugs out .
I just want to say I am scared and proud to have found zbrush

thanks
kawmart53

#4

Thanks, I’ll definitely try cleaning my pen and tablet! I bought the tablet used a couple of years ago, as I’m a kid and can’t afford new, expensive things like that (at least not back then, I was 15 or something), so I have no spare parts, sadly. But thanks! I’ll let you know how it goes :slight_smile:

Update: TVeyes, thank you so much for your help! I followed your suggestion and opened up the pen, and not only did I find a spare tip under the eraser tip, I also found what I believe is the source of the problem! It seems the eraser has been used a bit too much or too hard, and so it occationally was pushed down, even though I wasn’t doing anything to it. It was a bit loose, kind of. So I removed the plastic cap and the tip inside it (which I switched with the old, worn one), and now it seems to work just fine. I haven’t tried it yet, however, but the light on the tablet reacts like it should and I’m having no problem using the pen as a mouse. So thanks, I hope it’ll work now.

#5

Glad to hear it seems to have worked. You should be able to check the pressure level applied by opening the Wacom Tablet Properties window.

#6

The other thing too, is usually it’s the pen that has gone bad, not the tablet. So you can replace the cheaper pen if need be.

#7

That’s very good to know :slight_smile:

Thank you all for your help, it’s working now. Thank you :smiley:

#8

A note to Wacom tablet users… With my ancient Wacom ArtZ 2, I used to grind through tips at a fairly fast rate. five-tip replacement packs were expensive. I found out that an occasional call to tech support could yield a free pack of three replacement tips if I asked nicely. Since then I never purchased another pack.

Happily, with my new Intuos3, the original tips seem to last forever.

Sven