I have another weird edge engraving. Thank you for the tips on the issues I had before. I have shut off the Bi-directional which took care of the “wave” pattern. And I have enabled Scanning Offset Adjustment which took care of the fuzzy edge. Now I have something weird that’s really weird
I have attached pics of this “light” “unfilled” etch along edges of filled areas. I’m getting this
in areas when the laser does a band of lighter etch. It’s always to the right of the filled area. I have to either re-engrave or go back with a Dremel engraver to touch up these edges but I really need to get rid of this. It’s that lighter band of engraving causing this. Did one of the recent adjustments cause this? As always thank you very much for any advise to get rid of this.
Because you’ve disabled Bi-directional Fill, the laser is proceeding in only one direction. I suspect you’re looking at the turn-on delay of the CO₂ tube at the very low power levels used for acrylic. The opposite edge is crisp, because the laser tube shuts down very quickly.
You can verify that in the Preview simulation by playing in slow motion while watching which way the point is moving as it turns on and off.
The fuzzy region looks like it’s about a millimeter wide, which is 2 ms at 500 mm/s. The response time of the power supply is around 1 ms, although at low power levels it looks much worse; I guesstimate that layer is set for about 15% power.
The result will improve at a lower speed that compresses the turn-on delay into a shorter distance. That will (probably) require reducing the layer’s power, but I suspect it’s already pretty close to the minimum at which the tube will fire.
Again, that is likely due to the very low power level, where the tube is firing irregularly.
Contrary to the way you’d improve the edge detail, increasing the power at a faster speed will allow the tube to fire with more stability.
Unfortunately, you’re up against “how it works”, rather than the result of settings you can adjust. You may need to accept a slightly better compromise result rather than overall perfection.
