I just got a Creality Falcon 2 laser and am trying to think through the workflow for my projects. A lot of what I plan to make is going to be hand crafted and then lasered after, I got the idea of using a rechargeable glow in the dark material so that when you do the framing function it will create an outline for you to align your project with. Is this something that is even possible with a diode laser? Or what is your go to method for being able to make repeatable cuts without creating specialty jigs.
A fixture / jig is the way to avoid heartache & confusion due to misaligned workpieces. Manual alignment, no matter how clever, is doomed to failure when you can least afford it.
Cardboard boxes provide an inexhaustible supply of fixture material, as well as test pieces to make sure you have everything aligned correctly before laying down the spendy stuff. If you insist on being fancy, chipboard works really well, too.
Any fixture requires the machine to home properly every time it’s turned on. After that, using Absolute Coordinates makes the LightBurn workspace exactly match the physical platform, so that what you see is where it will burn every time.
Cut the fixture at that location, drop the parts in place, and Fire The Laser.
I make a lot of wood & slate coasters. I tape a single layer of manilla folder (cheap!) to the edge of my honeycomb platform, & use a layer in Lightburn to draw boxes & circles. It’s then easy to position the coasters inside the frames to rough align them. I started down the path of cutting frames from thin wood or 3D printing them, but the sizes of the materials I order aren’t always the exact same size & then things won’t line up properly.
Is it individual piece-to-piece variation that gets you? I’ve generally found my stock to be adequately consistent within a set (e.g. one supplier/order of cork coasters), but quite varied across types (e.g. “4-inch” coasters in cork are one size from one supplier and another size from another, and neither matches any of the “4-inch” coasters in slate). Some batches of rough slate coasters have had some outliers, but I’ve just been pulling those and use them as my test articles.
To deal with the variation in diameter from one material/batch to another, I took some 5mm plywood and cut an array of oversized squares out of it. I also added burned crosshair marks in the corners and along the edges, 10mm outboard of the cut squares. Then I made a template in LightBurn with a tool layer (i.e. T1/T2) with the same array of oversized squares and an outer rectangle (with framing on) 10mm outboard.
When I’m setting up for a new design, I paste it into each of the oversized squares, aligning each to the lower right corner of its square. The jig goes on the bed, and I set the job origin (or current position) on the lower right crosshair, with the jig aligned by jogging over to one or more of the additional crosshairs. (This means I don’t have to worry about trying to achieve and keep physical placement tolerances, as placing/aligning the jig is quick and easy.) Items to be engraved then get dropped into each cutout and slid to the bottom right.
I can do anything that fits into the jig (circles, squares, rectangles…), as long as the individual parts are consistent enough. I was thinking about inconsistent pieces, and what I’ve decided on (but haven’t yet implemented) is making some “alignment coasters” out of more 5mm plywood. I’ll engrave a bunch of concentric rings on the face of each to use for centering and a couple intersecting lines to use for rotational alignment. Then I can just drop them into my existing “coaster jig” whenever I have dimensionally inconsistent pieces to engrave.
(Note that if you make a jig like mine and you might engrave things with a 90° corner, you’ll want to add a little cutout to the registration corner, i.e. a small circle on that corner of the cutout square. That’ll take the point of the corner out of the alignment equation, keeping small bits of potential debris or inconsistency from preventing proper registration.)