This is why i prefer 
to even the best of the baltic birch:
Those hidden knots/streaks become pretty easy to see after you run the 35 minute cut on the piece. 
On the positive side, I was trying to place a rather wide cut on a scrap where it just barely fit, and nailed it! (So getting great alignment these days…thanks team GF!) 
This is what happens when you get too comfy and skip the flashlight test 
Guess how I know? Grumble.
My other favorite one is “ok I’ll do one more print run before I clean the GF”…incomplete cuts everywhere
Precise application of an exacto blade?
Nope, no good on the knots. Or glue spots or whatever the heck those are - you talk about dense.
(Doesn’t really matter anyway, it’s not going to work for what I wanted to use it for. I was just wanting to test some different living hinge shapes. (Still think the best one for actually bending the wood is just the straight lines. It’s stable, flexible, and the easiest to shape so far.)
This one might work for something else though.
It’s pretty, anyway. Maybe you can find a use for it!
Thanks for the head up, I have a few sheets of Baltic Birch with the football shape plugs and I will try to avoid them.
Those plugs should not be bad, they are wood. It’s the interior sheets that have voids in them, and get filled with different fillers. I have seen Bondo used.
Not on Baltic Birch. If you do, bring it back because it’s not what you paid for. That is definitely not in the manufacturing standard for BB 
No, I was referring to plywood in general.
Lots of junk in regular plywood. But not such a big problem for its purpose. Just not something a cabinet maker or laser user wants to encounter. Some of it is good in fact - the more waterproof glues are great for lots of projects, they just don’t laser well.
I appreciate the standard that PG holds to. I use Draftboard for a ton of prototyping but use BB ply often again because it’s the same thickness as Draftboard whereas medium Draftboard isn’t the same as all of the medium PG plywoods (and they’re not the same as each other). It makes moving a design from one to the other a bit more problematic. Tight joints become loose ones or impossible depending on which material I start with. Just argues for more Fusion 360 parametric practice
I was actually kidding… 
That said, this is where precise alignment using the camera would come in handy, no?
Chuckle! Kidding or not, I actually tried it. 
I got perfect alignment using the camera, (look at that second shot), the problem was not seeing the glue wads, or knots, or whatever they were, inside the material.
I understand that you can hold those up to a light source and catch them sometimes, but I didn’t do that. It would have been the only thing that could have saved that one. My bad.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve got a ton of off cuts that I was planning to use, but might just give it a miss or @evansd2 flashlight test suggestion. This forum is brilliant!
rdsxzz
That line was “typed” by Ninja, the wonder cat who decided to stroll across the keyboard.
I’m so sorry about the failed piece – it is hugely frustrating. I’ve just been using PG (except for stone and slate work) for exactly that reason. Consistency and reliability have proven to be of utmost importance, and I have really been able to rely on the PG materials in my projects…
It’s great that you let your kitty get involved… (or are you not given a choice?)
Me too! I’ve started living dangerously and not doing any registration marks.
No choice
It looks to me like there is a large rectangle of good cutting there I have been fighting those all day just trying to get a proof of concept happening. I can’t seem to find my jewelers saw frame or I would have gone there, where the piece was small enough
When I was cutting well, I could average about 1 minute per hole, drill the hole for the blade, mounting the blade, and actually doing the cut.
If my estimate is right, you’ve got about 320-ish holes there, so roughly 6 hours cutting !
What did the glowforge take, and was that a vector cut or an engrave ?
