I have read all the documentation and looked at all the video tutorials I can find but I’m still struggling to get the cutting a larger project than your laser bed to work. Is it possible for the tech bods to create a flow chart or something similar on how to complete this process successfully? I think this would be of great help.
P.S.
This is the bit I’m struggling with (see screen shot)
Pretty common problem. You have to come up with some way to ‘register’ the piece when it’s moved so the machine is synced up with the move.
Lightburn has a feature called Print and Cut that I would look into. I was too ignorant when I did mine to fully understand the wide variety of options in Lightburn, so it didn’t dawn on me they’d have such a feature… (now they only need to handle the camera via the Pi Bridge and the gods will have answered our wishes )
One thing is there is no ‘kerf’ setting available if your cutting joints on the end of an item. To set a kerf you need to have a closed path and some parts require it if you’re working on an ‘end’.
You can find information on how people have done it on multiple platforms. It’s most common on PCB videos where you ‘flip’ the board over and do operations on the reverse side.
I did a job on my laser that was long and went through the ‘feed through’. I have holes drilled on my table. I start with a pair of holes that I cut. Then I move it up to go into the tables existing holes.
I do the engraving and make two new alignment holes in the bottom. You can then shift the material up and be aligned on the table.
I used a repeating pattern. Some of the holes were filled and some used to mount the engraving. Never tried breaking up an image or vector to do this. It’s kind of a brain tease the first few times.
I drew the whole thing in Autocad, then divided it up into 2 halves with a 2mm overlap. Made side templates to the top was right in the middle of the laser bed, then cut one half.
I lined up the 2nd half by first spotting the laser into position with the pulse finction, putting a couple of layers of masking tape ove the joins and making that section near the join a new layer and setting the laser resonably fast and very low power so it only marked the tape and didn’t go through to the wood. I could then see visually how lined up it was and make adjustments as needed. Personally I wouldn’t trust the print and cut feature to be accurate enough because the 2nd half you are cutting is not including the bit you already had cut so how can you use it to line it up.
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