ryan.niemer:
so thin
Looks great.
As for thin lines, especially vertical thin lines, you may need to slow the laser down to get good results. I learned this the hard way on my rat mink skull:
So if there was ever a topic that deserved to be in “beyond the manual” – I’m pretty sure they aren’t ever going to offer proofgrade skulls.
Things I did right:
Got the non-crumb-tray height correct with new spacer blocks.
Settings were 1000/30/270lpi. Seems good, nice dark engrave…
Things I didn’t do right:
The design (vector) was way too intricate, the finer lines didn’t even mark. In hindsight, this is a no-brainer, some of these lines were about a kerf thick. Brain took a back seat…
and then diagrammed some laser theory here:
Yes, by cutting face down.
(laser theory follows)
There is no way to get a inverted kerf profile with the glowforge, focus height won’t do it, nothing will. It’s all down to the physics of the laser and the circular cross section of the light beam.
It can help to think of it like a series of “dots” of light. You can model it pretty effectively with semitransparent circles in your favorite image editor:
Imagine the laser is a circle of uniform light density (it is, mostly), you get this so…
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