Help with "panels" on cutter

[keggert]

Hopefully this is the right area for this question.

I was wondering if there was a way to cut two panels on seperate jobs so that it doesn't waste a lot of vinyl between the two pieces. To explain my situation a little better, I was cutting a "swoop" design for the side of a vehicle that angled down from the upper left of the page to the lower right. The design was too wide for a single sheet on my 24" cutter. Because of this, the production manager split it into two panels (which was fine with me), but the panels were 20" wide by 120" long with only half of each panel being used (the bottom half of panel 1 and the top half of panel 2). Because of this, the vinyl in between the cut areas was about 10 feet long with no part of it being used. It would have been nice to cut each panel seperately and shrink down the panel size to eliminate the uncut area and thus the waste.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Kevin

 

[iSign]

I cut my oversize shapes myself, instead of letting the software do it. Then I can cut it where I think it will look best, & I can rotate either half to best fit the material, or to best gang it up with other work needing to be cut in that same color.

 

[asignstop]

fitting graphics in tight panels

Yeah I do the same - it can be time consuming but it saves material. If it's one long piece (or swoosh) I would just duplicate what you want to cut, flip it around and place it snug atop the other, then select everything to cut in production manager (flexi), but just panel half of it (should cut both ends that way). I included a picture of how I had something similar recently for graphics too large for my 30". I also like to stuff my logo in any unused space (in this case it was gold reflective, so I think I didn't even weed them).

 

[imaSIGNr]

I don't know if I can say this right, But I know exactly what you're asking......I would Copy the whole graphic that you're working on and use this one for your cut job( keeping the original undisturbed ) , Weld all, Place it into your cut/plot page to see where the page cut would be, then go back to the document, cut the "swoosh" off with your cleaver tool making sure to have enough overlap on your swooshes, then you can separate the swooshes and place them where needed so you don''t waste vinyl. ...Does this make sense ?

 

[keggert]

Thanks for all the help. All the ideas you've put out there sound better than what I've been doing. I've just gotten started doing this stuff and I'm learning by trial and error.

Thanks again.