I’m curently working with some plywood that is not quite ideal for laser cutting (marine ply with phenolic glue). It’s hard to cut, and it does not burn cleanly. It has a tendency to char a lot on the edges. If my cuts are too slow, then the edges start to burn away because of the air assist. To minimize this, I can do a lot of quick passes, so that the edges have time to cool down between passes. This is clearly not ideal, but it works quite well and I can’t find any marine ply without phenolic glue around where I leave, at least not if I’m not willing to buy a full stack of it.
Anyway, my issue is with small features, let’s say I have a small hole to cut for a screw. splitting the cut in multiple passes does not help me in that case, because the head stays above that small area during the whole time, so I get a lot of charring and the hole turns out quite bigger and weaker.
I also can’t simply add a delay between passes because then the head would stay above the burnt area and the air assist would keep the edge burning.
The parts I need to cut have a lot of these holes so I think the solution would simply be to do one pass for each holes, then start over again X times. But this is not the way multiples passes are done in lightburn, at least by default. Right now the laser will do X passes on the 1st hole, then X passes on the 2nd hole, and so on. So it’s not helping me here.
The only solution I’ve found is to set only one pass and run the job X times, which is quite annoying.
Is there another solution ?
Thank you