Hello all. I’m trying to burn a project for my Grandson who is into martial arts. The project is a 6" circle with a dragon Yin Yang on one side of the circle and a definition of a Yin Yang on the opposite side with my grandson’s name. The issue, I carved the definition on the back with his name and the carve went fine. When I carve the dragon Yin Yang it’s offset in the circle. This has happened twice now, both times I get the wobble carving the Yin Yang. I’ve checked my center and re-checked my center and it’s dead on for both sides. I even created a jig with a 6" centered hole to hold the circle blank, no luck.
My machine is a Longer Ray 5 with a 20w laser and I have an air assist.
To help with alignment of art to a physical object, I suggest using a flat scrap of cardboard and cutting a hole the size of your material to use as a holding jig. This allows you to produce the first side, then flip the material, dropping it back in the cardboard jig. If you do not move the jig, the material will be registered on both sides.
I would also look into the ‘Center Finder’ to assist with finding the center of circular stock, as well as defining that stock in your LightBurn Workspace.
Rescaling the photos to the same size and overlaying them with a bit of transparency suggests both engravings are off to the left by about the same amount:
The ends of the text lines are closely aligned with the circle just inside the border, so the centerline of the text block is pretty close to the centerline of the graphic: both are misaligned on the disk.
I like using the center as a starting point. Seems to work pretty well. Another possibility is there’s a booger somewhere in the file. a booger is a vector that is very small and hard to see.That would through off of the center point.
Do you check the center with a blue laser dot, a red laser dot or with a combination square?
There is a software setting for offsetting a red dot pointer away from the blue dot working laser. The offset can be set with the wrong distance or it can be misapplied to the the blue-dot framing.
Using a combination square on each side of the laser module to align the work can cause a small offset if the laser beam doesn’t come out of the center of the module. A combination square would be likely to show if the module isn’t perfectly vertical or if the beam didn’t arrive on the workpiece where it’s expected to. Any of these could contribute to the incorrect offset.
The similarity of the offset on top and bottom face of the project leads me away from inquiry along the lines of motion related mechanical problems.
Are you engraving back and forth bi-directionally? Bi-directional engraving can show backlash problems and engraving in one direction (Left-to-Right line after line) can hide it.
I don’t see other symptoms of backlash problems so let’s start with the above.
