Anyone tried cutting 1inch walnut? Also, In the settings, I cant change the material height beyond 0.500. I removed the tray and it seems to be working. But not sure how many passes this will need, at what speed and intensity for this particular cut.
Ill post pictures of the results.
You can’t change the height beyond .5" because whatever surface you are cutting/engraving has to stay within that .5" regardless if the tray is in or not. So if you took the tray out, you need to put something in to space up the face of the material to within that 0.5".
Have a look at this. There are several other similar posts as well.
Yeah we did 4 cuts with 3 passes each full power and a pretty slow speed… Got maybe an 1/8th of an inch cut through. Gonna have to figure out a better solution. Ill check out that post. Thank you for your response.
You are not going to be able to cut 1" wood. You can engrave on top of material that thick by removing the tray and shimming the material to fall within the focus zone. The GF has a 0.5" focus range. The beam will diverge enough outside of that to do little more than char your material.
I was able to cut .43" walnut with a Pro and full power at a very slow speed… The cut was successful but the edges we’re both slanted due to beam divergence or the vaporized material, and very charred. Not something I found would be usable in any project.
I can cut 0.27" black walnut with two passes and a speed of a hundred and something. That you could only get through 1/8" with three passes seems something is not exactly right, like maybe the focus height? I would expect you could eventually cut through it, you would have to cut halfway through and flip it over of course, but as rpegg said, the quality of the cut would leave a lot to be desired. Or you are using a different species of walnut and none of this applies.
I would recommend a scroll saw or similar. I tried cutting half-inch plywood and thought I would be cute and engrave it a quarter inch, and then I would only be cutting, 1/4 inch plywood 
I did get it cut, but I had char pits all around.
the lens in a glowforge is extremely sub optimal for cutting 1" material. In most lasers you would run a 4" lens to cut something that thick.
best way to do it and use the laser is cut a 1/4" thick template and use a router with a pattern bit
It’s not the lens, it’s the wattage. A 40W laser isn’t going to cut 1" wood without a lot of passes and subsequent charring.
It’s both, I would say. With the wattage, just not enough horsepower to get through. And then with the 50mm lens, the beam doesn’t stay in focus deep enough.
It’s both, but the wattage had already been disscussed. But even if all we put in was 1" foam (wattage no longer an issue) the cut will still suck because of the lens.