For many in the large format vehicle wrap business having a dedicated optical-eye style vinyl cutter is more a luxury than an absolute necessity. More often than not - vinyl graphic printers are outputting panel after panel of digital art and heading straight for the laminator. So what happens when a logo or graphic element requires a contour cut?.. You’ll probably trim by hand if you don’t have a cutter capable of optical registration.

This article explains a simple technique of achieving a proper cut path on printed vinyl without an optical-eye registration cutter such as a Mimaki CG-130. This method works well on broad shapes and even lettering depending on how you setup your vinyl, but of course will not replace a proper file sent from the rip stage, matching files, with a optical cutter.

We’ll begin this tutorial with our design - a life preserver logo we’re looking to have contour cut along the inside and outside. In this example we’ll setup the graphic 3 copies across and the print to look like this including the black rectangle.

Above is the image we will send to print and it will be paired with our image we’re looking to contour cut. So once the image is correctly printed, cured, laminated - we can prepare to send our cut file, but before we do this, let’s have a look at the file we created with the raster image. The magenta is our cut line, as you can see we are effectively sending a cut and self-made weed border.

Load your printed material into your regular cutter with the top corner of rectangle set to 0,0 and enter it as the origin. Using the top horizontal printed line from the print as a guideline to match with your cutter so the it’s straight.

With the material straight and the origin set we’re ready to try the alignment. Back off the cut weight so it doesn’t cut or replace knife with a pen. Then select only the rectangle (shown here in blue) and send it through. If the cutting head tracks well or close enough, go ahead and send the everything.

In the event the plotting alignment is not tracking straight, continue removing and trying to align straight across the cutting axis and making test runs before committing to the final cut. In an example such as this, with fairly loose registration, it should take more than a few moments to align and have production actually happening. The time used in this “Poor Man’s” contour cut equals to approximately the same amount time it would take to have it optically registered.