Weird speed or power issue?

I’ve been using lightburn to run the company laser for the past few months and I am starting run into an issue thats …genuinely perplexing me.
Most of what I do on the laser is etch away the back of mirrors in order to “pipe” led lighting through.
Uusually this goes fine but I am increasingly running into this issue and I just dont know why its happening.

This is the back of one of them, the longer line is the initial line, it SHOULD all have that frosted look, but for some reason it has this …uh…mountain shape there. initially it leaves some residue, that can be wiped away to get the clean glass.
At first I assumed there may be some dinference in the material under the black coating, maybe I am running into patches of thicker backing?
so I tried running a copy of the same shape but shrunk to be around the mountain to “show” the spot …this got me nothing.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on with this?

spegl.lbrn2 (7.7 KB)
here is the project file just in case though I doubt that will offer any more insight.

I believe you should look at how your maximum and minimum power levels are set. Since I’m not sure where else to start.

There is a “Start Speed” in the controller configuration that tells your machine how to vary the power.
The controller ‘builds’ a power curve based on not only the minimum and maximum power but how it relates to speed. Start speed is where the minimum power lever starts. If your speed goes below that it will never get greater than minimum power.

Am not sure if that’s your issue, but it would be easy to set both max and min to the same and see if there is a difference. Generally with a ‘scan’ type of engraving this isn’t an issue and shows up mostly in vector cuts…

I do a lot of the same mirror work on my 50 watt. Have never seen that pattern. Also I’m assuming a 90 scan angle. Can you tell if the current draw changes? Might be kind of a tough question since you have to know when it’s going to fail.

:smiley_cat:

Matching the minimum and max power might be the answer I neeeded for these types of engraving, thank you.

After checking my start speed is at 10 mm/s so …I dont really know if the machine goes that slow in the middle of the operation, given the speed on the layer is set to 300.

Given my setup and the protection for the people working around me, I cant really observe the power draw and see what the engraving is looking like.

To add even more confusion to this before leaving to go home (and before your response) I set up several line sin the same material, seeing as it was already waste material at this point, doing the same length lines with various widths …and they all came out perfectly fine despite otherwise having the exact same layer setting.

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