If you are already sort of an experienced installer, you would have known there can be various situations coming up when it comes to the corners of recessed areas.
Today we will be re-positioning what would happen when you do cut and drop in such area to introduce you a relatively simple solution. This is kind of a common problem to most wrappers. So it is an excellent tactic to learn for both beginners and intermediate installers, as it will surely add good quality to your outcome.
First, we will go through the standard approach to cut and drop technique here, where we bridge the material over the recessed area from top to bottom. Make sure you get glass inside the area. This is perhaps nothing new to some. Once everything is set here, use your squeegee to squeegee a little bit in the middle, and lock the material in the place.
The next step is to click the blade as you do in every install, be sure it is very sharp – Bear in mind to use a short, shallow blade though because this is extremely important. Cut it from the high side, and alongside the bridge right there. This will allow you to cut flush to the top edge.
But when it comes to the corner, let’s cut flush there as well. So put the flush on the side and the corner. Just do a straight cut around. And we can slow down a bit when it comes to corners. Make it the side to the blade and super flushed to the edge the entire time.
And now is the time to squeegee the material. First do it on the flat side, where it is nice and smooth. Then the corners. If you went through the standard cut and drop method as mentioned above, it is apparent that you will see a lot of materials go on to the corners.
And depending on the thickness of the film as well as the color saturation, there might be lots of wrinkles coming up. Even if you use heat there, you will get a lot of super tight bottle capping, which leads to really low quality of cut and drops on the corners.
Usually, what installers would do to clean this up is that they will trim that short on the bottom, to get rid of those. But this means they will be cutting directly on the paint, which is not recommended.
So how can we solve this problem in a slightly safer way? What we will be introducing here is how to avoid cutting directly on the paint but get the high quality and symmetry. The steps basically remain the same: Just bridging material over the gap, locking the flat section there.
And right now, do a full cut right there, cutting flush on the side just like before. However, when getting to the point where there are two inches from the corner, take the blade out.
Before starting again, cutting around the corner, make sure your blade stays parallel to the edge and angling in because this will avoid cutting the body of the car. And same like before, slow down a little bit there.
The trick here is to be as symmetrical as possible because you are cutting the back right now. Make it like a half-move, and be sure it is symmetrical from one point to the other where you cut short the gap.
And once you hit the other side, feel free to go back to the regular technique of keeping the blade flushed and on the upper portion of race ridge right there. When you get to the bottom, as soon as you get to the point of two inches from the corner, you can take your blade off, and change to the second method there again.
It is all about having excellent hand skills and focus at this point. If you have good control of your knife, you can just come back to the other side. The side can kind of hold the blade so that it will be a secured cut.
Now that everything is done, you can squeegee the corner like before. But there is no more tension there anymore because you did that kind of slight cutback on the corner. So it fits in there perfectly right now. So in this case, it is pretty critical to cut enough, but not too much though.
Last but not least, here we have come to the sealing stage. A recommendation here is to put on your application glove and run around with your finger quickly, to lock the material and form it, as it might get wrinkles if you use a squeegee.
In this way, you will get an excellent quality recessed area to install for doing this sort of new cut and drop technique, and it is especially helpful when doing full print graphics.
