Newbie to decals, contour cutting, testing out some options and have questions

[gwizah]

Okay, so first and foremost I have owned a secondhand Mutoh Kona 1400 for about 5 years now and used it for dozens and dozens of vinyl placements, stencils, etc. I also own a wide format printer, but it's an older model Canon ipf8400 that doesnt do dye-sub.
Well i finally got my hands on a decent printer, a used Canon imagePrograf Pro-1000 for a steal. It doesnt print very wide, but it does print amazing colors and I wanted to try out contour cutting in Vinyl Master Cut. Ive already researched my options, and I belive printing from Illustrator to the Canon with crop marks, and then letting the Mutoh align itself would be the way to move forward.

So the trouble I am having is the contour cut wizard in Vinyl master cut appears to not give me any options to increase the force of my knife for a perf cut after the kiss cut. kiss cut seems to be cutting through on some tests I ran, but what is the point of doing a perf cut if I can't adjust the cutting force?

See screenshots 1 and 2.

So my first question is, is Vinyl Master cut limited in the ability to adjust cutting force when sending cuts to the plotter from the cutting wizard? Is there another option somewhere? I remember using FlexiSign at the signshop I worked at and being able to setup jobs in the software with adjustments like these on a similar plotter. Is it the version I am using?

My second question is, is there another software package that would give me a "print-to-cut" workflow with my existing hardware? I can print the bounding boxes (for the kona) on my files manually I assume, but aligning everything would be easier with software that does it for me.

Thanks for any input! I feel like theres many ways to skin a cat, and everyone has their own method!

 

[SeMi57]

When you double click on the Contour Cut (Blue) on the left side of the screen, is what's on the right opens? Sorry I work in Flexi and double clicking the the contour cut opens a window to adjust the force.

You can set the force on the cutter, but you would need to run it for the cutting twice, once for the contour cut and then increase the force and run for the kiss cut. Sorry again, I have not yet sucessfully done the kiss cut for separating the decals, I just slice them with sicssors after weeding the contour cut. Even with that I belive you need to do 2 passes, which you can program it to do the contour cut followed by the kiss cut, just I believe the cutter machine still dictates the force. Please anyone out there correct me too!

 

[gwizah]

Ok, I see what you mean, line up one job for the contour, then line up the second job for the Perf. I can try that.

It seems flexi has more options to control the cuts, but Im not sure if thats a limitation of the VinylMaster "Cut" version, as there are three upgrades "Pro" "LTR" "DSR".

If there's anyone who has previously used VinylMaster Cut to successful adjust cutting force, I'd appreciate hearing from them.