I’ve been trying out the Print and Cut feature and not having much luck, my plan is to print some stickers on my laser printer and then cut them out with the laser. I’m using the same SVG file for the printing as the cutting and just importing it to Lightburn. The SVG includes squares around the stickers that are printed to the sheet and I have chosen two corners at opposite sides of the sheet, snapped boxes to them and I’m using those as my targets and making sure I’m on target to within .1 mm.
When I run the job, the cuts appear to be squished or skewed compared to the prints, it’s not cutting around the graphics the way I expect, I assumed this was a calibration issue on my laser so I dialed in my steps/mm and made sure my gantry was running parallel, but that didn’t improve the situation. I also updated to the latest version in case my version was buggy and verified that my printer is printing accurately. I tried cutting with both scaled and un-scaled mode, but there was no difference.
What I’m looking for are suggestions on what to check or test, obviously the feature works for other people so there must be something in my process or machine that is causing weird behaviour.
I’m going to be running a test cut I designed to ensure my laser hasn’t lost repeatability, though I haven’t seen any other evidence of that while I was calibrating my steps/mm; does anyone else have any other suggestions as to what might be going on? I’ll see if I can follow up on this with some pictures as well to illustrate the issue I’m having.
I think this will be critical as there’s nothing obvious from what you’re describing.
My first reaction as I was reading this was that you likely had “scaled” on but you covered that.
You mention that you calibrated both the printer and the laser. I suspect this is still going to be where issues lie. I suspect either your printer or laser are not printing/cutting to dimension. Keep in mind that stepper calibration may not be the only thing causing skewed results. You could have other mechanical issues that may be skewing the results, for example a binding wheel. It’s also possible that this is inconsistent across the full span of your laser frame in extreme cases.
Can you do a comparison of designed dimensions vs printed dimensions vs burned dimensions? Should tell you pretty quickly where to focus your attention.
I tried a few different tests and finally found a mechanical flaw; one of the bearings has gone bad and only exhibits issues intermittently when changing direction, so all the tests I did with grids and squares showed everything was working perfectly, it wasn’t until I tried my repeatability test that I found the problem.
The repeatability test was just a simple document knocked together in Inkscape that had a star and lines all joining at the centre as well as a couple concentric circles for a few more direction changes, when the cut was done, the centre lines didn’t all meet, and the amount they were off was about the same as the amount my sticker cuts were off, I think once I fix the mechanical part this should work great.
It was in my X gantry on the lower rail, I built the machine with cheap bearings, so not really a surprise.
I’ve been working on a redesign of this machine since the current version is not easy to clean, maintain and align, and then I came across the Root3 CNC at rootcnc.com which is essentially the same thing I’ve been designing as V2 of my machine but with all the bugs worked out, so rather than try to correct the issues with V1, I’m just going to build a Root3 instead.