I need some help. When I frame, it is perfect to what I want engraved/cut. Preview is perfect. But once I press start, it engraves a bunch of scribbles, moves outide of frame, scribbles more, then moves even further outside of frame and engraves (most) of the text and then cuts. The shape cut is crisp but the circle is wonky.
There must be some kind of setting that’s off
Few other notes
-I am using absolute coordinates, -homing works fine, sets to 0,0
The Fill layer engraving speed of 5000 mm/min seems very fast for that big chunky laser head; the Line layer speed of 1100 mm/min seems more reasonable, but still fast. My guess is that the machine’s mechanics simply can’t run at those speeds.
Both use 100% power, which seems a mismatch between engraving and cutting.
Run a Material Test to see if a (much much) lower speed with a (much) lower power will improve the engraving, then do a similar test for the cut.
Cut up some Amazon boxes to practice on instead of that wood. The last thing to adjust is power, and I found c ardboard is not that much different than wood.
@ednisley is on target with that speed thing. Do not believe those ads and videos on how fast it can go. It is not a race car.
Thank you for commenting! I was struggling to even figure out what words to search for my issue.
I tried the Material Test, using the min and max speed that my laser recommended. And 10-100% power…. But I got much the same outcome.
When I run the Frame, it is exactly where it should be, but when I start, it goes way outside that frame
When I look at preview, everything looks good, but when I press start, the words are scrunched (basically scribbles) and way off alignment ……so far off I had to stop it because once it started doing the squares it was off the wood.
Is there maybe some kind of alignment I need to check?
Suffice it to say all manufacturers / sellers take ahem liberties with the numbers. In particular, they tend to mention the highest possible speeds with the heaviest possible laser head, a combination which never works well.
The speeds shown the Material Test are much faster than the ones in the original layers, so no good can come from them. By “much much lower” I meant start at maybe 500 mm/min, not 12000 mm/min.
You must run two Material Tests, one for engraving and one for cutting. Hit the Edit Material Setting button to set up the layer type for Fill or Line as appropriate.
The doc will be useful in figuring out what’s happening:
Because the test squares are relatively small, the laser cannot reach high speeds during the Line test. You will likely find my suggested 500 mm/min is too high for cutting, so reduce that as needed.
