Adjust the thickness of the "expand" command?

Question

I have a vector I made of a small (2.5 x 4) tribal type design that's failry complex (and a PITA to weed out!). I cut it on a plotter. I need to add a thin pinstripe to the edge. I used the "expand" command and that achomplished what I wanted but it is too thin. I need to "stripe" to be a little thicker. The design is so small I think I will never be able to successfully weed it being that thin.
Is the "expand" amount adjustable? Is there another way to go about it? (I tried "offset path" but that left a mess of lines all over both inside and outside. It would take me forever to clean that up). Since I will be using a plotter the least amount of extraneous lines being added is ideal to lessen my clean up time. I am fairly good with PS but Illustrator, vectors, and Plotters are pretty new to me.

Answer 1

You could combine the text then use offset path. Then the path would be for the over all object instead of each character. (offset path is affected by the stroke width) This could add an inside path which would be undesirable for you.
Another option is to apply a stroke instead of offset path, you can add multiple strokes in the appearence panel. Using the appearence panel you can move the fill above the inside stroke path covering it up, making less work for you.
These are just some ideas, play with the stroke width and the appearence panel and see how they work with compound paths, groups, etc.