Leaderboard

What I do, is with the roll sitting on the stand rollers I put the end of the vinyl in the machine then hold it with one hand and roll the roll with the other taking out the slack. This usually squares it up pretty good, then just put the clamps down, unroll what will be needed for the cut and hit go.

As mentioned above, your cutter may have more dificulty on drift than a higher end machine. I would definitly pre-feed (pre-jog) any work you do and you will have better luck. You should also take a look in Vinyl Mster in the Vinyl Spooler menu in Cut Options tab there is a box you can check called Cut In Strips (at least there is in the Pro version). I have not used this but I beleive it is a user defined amount of length that gets cut and then moves on to the next zone as it goes down the length of a project. I use a different cutting utility that has similar. It may help you on longer projects to overcome the inherent drift (called off-tracking) that happens on the budget machines. I used to have a budget cutter and occasionally battled this with my cutting program (SignCut Pro) which calls this feature "step-by-step cutting". My experience was that it really helped in long but simple jobs, but if the design was complicated (like with a bunch of text) the cutter didn't have the accuracy to cut parts of a bunch of letters and then try to come back and finish the other parts of the letters when in the next zone. But on long large graphics the slight misalignment at the step points was not so bad that it caused issues and I was able to cut some fairly large sign elements. This is one of the benefits of the higher end cutters. IF you find yourself doing enough to justify an upgrade it saves a lot of stress and mistakes. I have cut designs as long as 22 ft without problem with my new cutter. I have shifted to HTV on shirts moslty now but still benefit by being able to cut hundreds of copies of a logo without a tracking problem or static or memory space.

All of my rolls are 150 ft and I just prefeed the vinyl and leave it on the roll.

Load the vinyl then manually advance it the length you will need.

You might get an idea of the degree of drift if you pre-jog the vinyl, and watch the level of drift compared to the ruler, or some kind of fixed mark. Correct drift as much as possible. I you cannot, then you can see if your design can be broken up into shorter pieces. The value machines will have more drift than the more higher end machines.

My rule-of-thumb for designs is as follows: 24" vinyl -- 22" workspace (1" margins) 30" vinyl -- 28" workspace I align the vinyl as perfectly as possible and avoid drift/stray on the full run. If you're not going to cut a longer length, then you can reduce the margins all the way to a fraction of an inch (or mm's as you guys figure) and should be OK.

You have to account for two distortions, and the image will always look a little off if you're not looking at it exactly straight on. First you need to account for the curve of the glass. Since glass is an inverted truncated cone use the diameter of the cup about where the middle of the design would be. Easiest way to do that would be to take a string and wrap it around the cup where the design will be, that will get you the circumference. Divide that number by Pi, 3.14, to get the Diameter to use in the equation below. H = h/w*D*sin(w/D) h - height of image w - width of image D - diameter of cup H - new height for image And here is a discussion on how to account for the tapered shape of the glass which includes a spreadsheet to do the math so you can create a template. Even with all this, there's still can be a bit of experimentation to get the design perfect but I've been pretty pleased with my results.