LightBurn newbie here. I’m using LightBurn with an Ortur OLM-3 laser, driven by a 2013 MacBook Pro. My first project (and major reason for venturing into this) is cutting about 600 identical Christmas ornament blanks from 3/16" birch plywood. I volunteer at the Minnesota Zoo, and our annual fundraiser is to create an ornament of a different animal each year. I handle the cutting and sanding (formerly very laboriously on a scroll saw) and a crew of painters create the details per a design sketch.
I started with a photo of next year’s ornament sketch (a chickadee), which I imported as a JPEG into LightBurn. After descending the learning curve a bit I managed to create a cutting outline and smooth out the perimeter irregularities in the sketch for a smooth cut. I then started doing test burns to determine an optimal speed and number of passes to completely cut out each ornament in this stock (100% power, 275 mm/min, 3 passes).
This is where things get confusing. When I select my 3 passes, Preview will show 6 passes, 3 in one direction and 3 in the other (and a test burn does the same thing, of course), and I can’t find any setting or reason for this. Even weirder, when I replicate the chickadee for an 11-up cut (about half my eventual 400x400mm layout) and choose “Cut Selected,” selecting one or a few and previewing will show the number of passes I choose. However, if I select one too many (or all), it reverts to back-and-forth doubling.
Addendum: It turns out that if I start with one ornament and then add others individually, Lightburn will make the number of passes I choose. However, if I drag-select one or more it reverts to doubling my passes.
no, that is not correct! sorry
You have traced your birds and have 2 lines per bird, I only saw it now.
It surprised me that I could not mark all the birds on the top and delete them and by enlarging the image it becomes clear.
That’s not happening for me, and I only have one layer (baby steps; I haven’t knowingly ventured into multiple layers yet ;-). Are you seeing layers I’m not? How about uploading your duplicate-deleted file (with a name change to avoid confusion) so I can compare and confirm?
Yup, I enlarged and can see them now (and can delete the second lines and artifacts). I still don’t understand why my selection scheme affected the one-or-two-pass result. Any ideas?
Thanks much for the help; this has been a head-scratcher. Are you actually in Denmark? If so, you’re up early. BTW, my name of course is Danish; our ancestral home is in Kolding (haven’t visited since my teens in 1962, much to my regret). One day, perhaps… Thanks again, ~Ken
You are correct, I live on Funen, (the green island in the middle)
Kolding is only 45 minutes from here and has developed a lot in recent years, nice town.
And yes, I’m early on it, couldn’t sleep so well last night, so I’m having fun with LightBurn instead.
Well, I’m glad you were up, as I was going around in circles on this. (Of course you realize that you’re now my go-to guy as I proceed down the learning curve and hit more bumps along the way…
Speaking of learning curves, I can pass along some more or less useless knowledge of my own (gleaned from a production management class decades ago): You’ll note that I talk about descending the curve, when 99+% of the world thinks you climb it (and “steep” is bad). The learning curve is a manufacturing concept that postulates that as you produce more widgets it generally takes less time to produce each, due to learning. The curve has total units produced on the X-axis and production time per unit on the Y-axis. A steep curve actually denotes very quick learning, starting high and descending quickly. So a difficult learning situation should be described as a “long” learning curve. Pedantic rant over…
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