Hi, friends! I have been experimenting with cutting through the 1/2" walnut from Inventables with no success yet. I’ve tried a variety of powers and speeds and passes, only to discover that I likely don’t really know what I am doing and am just randomly guessing.
I’ve tried full power at 100 and 200 speed and that just chars the crap out of it (with masking) and nearly starts a fire (and doesn’t get through. I tried lower power (70 and 80) and played with speeds between 100 and 300 and with 2 passes with no success. I don’t want to burn up more materials than I have to, so I am coming here for the wisdom of the group.
If you’ve cut it before, could you help me with settings? If you haven’t, but could provide some insight, I’d be grateful as well.
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I don’t have any experience with walnut, but you can run up to 3 passes with each file load, and if your material hasn’t moved, you can run 3 more etc. I ran 9 passes to incise travertine.
Someone with more experience could tell you better ‘How to’ but I think lowering the focus (below the thickness) you can dig deeper.
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That’s great info! Thank you!
I was worried about multiple passes because after I ran two, I didn’t move anything and the image in the UI was way off. I did open the lid to take a look at it, but i didn’t touch anything. Is that why it looked so far off?
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don’t trust the user interface too much at this point. It will look off. but if you hit print again, without moving anything it will cut exactly in the same spot.
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Welcome to the forum 
What area of Denver are you in?
Around South Broadway area I-25 and Alameda!
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You can get an arbitrary number of passes if you lay multiple paths on each other. When I cut my ipe sample it was 9 passes at I think about 350/Full.
I made 3 copies of a shape and stacked them, then told the UI to do 3 passes on it. 3x3, voila.
Of course you can do any combo here and get however many passes you want, in theory. 9 paths, one pass. 17 paths, 1 pass (primes are hard). Good luck and be careful.
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I use two passes and a fairly slow speed for 1/4" walnut. You can search for 0.27" Walnut to see my post about it, so for 1/2" I’d expect at least three. IIRC the settings are at the bottom of the OP.
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Did you get this figured out? If so, could you share what worked for you?
Nope. 
No joy. Haven’t been able to cut through. I suspect I could with a large number of passes, but if it takes that much, I don’t know that I’m interested.
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i’ve been curious about this. I thought I had some alignment issues on my machine.
Doing multiple passes over the same project, it always comes out wrong. Is this just a UI issue? Is there a calibration offset?
If your settings tell the glowforge to do 2 or 3 passes and the laser does not exactly go over the same spot, then you should contact support.
If you cut/score/engrave something and then repeat the same job, without moving the material or going to Home in the app (or having the app through an error or something), and the laser does not exactly go over the same spot, then you should contact support.
If your design file has a 12x20 inch artboard, and you never move anything in the GFUI and you never move the material (but you can go to Home, or in and out of the app), and the laser does not exactly go over the same spot, then you should contact support.
What is normal is for the preview to show it is cutting in one place and to then cut in a slightly different place. Even if it is a repeat cut.