On thicker/tougher materials (e.g. 3mm or thicker plywood, or acrylic), I know some (model railroad kit) designers do a scribe over their tabs. That allows the tab to hold the cut-out piece, but makes it easier for the builder to cut the tab. I wonder if there’s a clever way to use sub-layers to get more-or-less automatically?
Maybe your searching for this;
Also take a look at perforated mode.
You’re right, I didn’t look carefully enough at Tab Settings. You can set “% of max power” to cut the tab at a lighter setting. But how is that interpreted, max Laser Power (absolute), or a percentage of the power used on the line outside of the tab?
You gotta start looking in the doc for answers:
If Tab Cut Power is set to any value other than 0%, the laser will make pulsed cuts across the width of the tabs instead of skipping them completely.
Increasing the percentage increases the amount the laser pulses on during tabs, resulting in tabs that are more weakly connected to the base material.
Well, that quote doesn’t answer the question. A percentage implies there’s a base value. If the line is 5 mm/sec @ 30%, what does entering “50%” get me? A power level of 50% (absolute) or a power level of 15% (50% of the 30% specified for that line. If the pulses are pulses of the line setting, then the resulting power would be 15% (half of 30%, pulsed on and off.)
If I’m successfully cutting at 30%, a tab cut at more would probably not have the intended effect…
OK, here’s the next paragraph from the doc:
In the example below, the top tab is set to 25%, while the bottom tab is set to 75%. The black lines represent areas along the path where the laser is on, and the red lines represent areas where the laser is off.
Think of it as low-res PWM.
Really & truly, the doc explains pretty nearly everything surprisingly well.
Ah, Ok. So running at full strength at the specified intervals. So the equivalent of ‘perforations’. (It’s my nature to dig at something that I don’t quite get until I fully understand it…)
Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but start your digging by Reading The Fine Doc, because it will answer a whole bunch of questions, some of which you haven’t even thought of yet.
While you’re in LightBurn, hitting F1 with the cursor on the thing you don’t quite understand will (generally) show the relevant doc page in the browser. If that fails, feeding a few keywords into the doc’s search bar will get you closer.
A few minutes devoted to RTFD can save all of us a few hours of tedious back-n-forth on the basics.
Fair enough?