A few years ago I purchased a "cheaper" vinyl cutter to not only cut vinyl graphics but to try to cut iron on covering too. Turned out that it works quite well for that as well. Just need to adjust the blade depth and pressure, Ultracote (Oracover) is a natural for the cutter as the backing is pretty thick similar to vinyl sign material. But Monokote can also be cut with just a little more care on adjusting the blade depth. You want the cutter to go through the covering but not through the backing. I did a pretty long thread on Flying Giants as my first attempt was on a 40% Dalton in a Red Bull scheme. Worked out quite well and when I messed up a piece of cut covering, a couple of clicks on the computer and a new piece of covering was reproduced in a couple of minutes. Imagine trying to cut out the Bull for a Red Bull scheme by hand only to mess it up and have to re-cut it again by hand
The Dalton was pretty involved with lots of lettering and curved designs on both the flying surfaces and the Fuse which was built up balsa and ply.
When covering with iron on materials I have always used the process of minimizing the covering over covering (traps air bubble to easily) I use a 4 to 5 mm overlap of the covering at the seams. Only the thinner stripes will go directly over covering anything over 10 mm wide will have bare balsa in the center. This is a fairly common method these days but not so much back in the 80's when I started using it.
In the past I made brown paper templates of the pieces to be cut out. Taped them to a sheet of covering and cut them out using an 11 blade over a sheet of glass. Straight cuts were no issue but curved cuts required curved templates like french curves, glasses, cans, dinner plates etc
Some pieces required combinations of curved and straight templates. The nice thing about using a vinyl cutter is that you are designing the piece in a drawing program which makes making smooth curves a breeze and as already mentioned if you make a mistake it is easy to fix and re-cut a new piece. If you are covering more than one of the same plane or use the same pattern on each plane once the basic design is done more copies are easy to make. It is also much easier to fine tune your design as changes are much easier than redrawing the whole thing with markers and colored pencils or crayons.
This will be a how to thread on using a drawing program and vinyl cutter for the pattern community.
My prior thread on FG is at
http://www.flyinggiants.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=64795