@davidgal2 It was .25" so I had to set it to .433". Worked better than I thought it would!
That is great to know. 
Thanks for testing and sharing with all of us.
5 Likes
Hokey smokes, that’s fantastic!
4 Likes
Thank you. I haven’t done anything with acrylic yet, but it is high in my list.
3 Likes
That’s pretty sweet! Have you done a comparison with a backlight, to show how it affects the translucency? Is the lighting more diffused in a nicer way as well?
5 Likes
I wonder how much clearer defocusing would be on extruded acrylic. I’m thinking of reverse engraving on the back and filling, leaving the paint fill protected on the back of the piece. Looking at this post I don’t think that idea would work, unless defocusing in extruded gives a clearer engrave. Perhaps playing with power or LPI would also change the look?
https://community.glowforge.com/t/time-for-an-escutcheons/8435?u=bill_laba
1 Like
Woooof! That’s way more defocusing than I did in my acrylic coaster testing last month.
Nice work.
Have you noticed that the GFUI seems to build in defocusing for it’s “by color” options? If you pick a color and then convert it to manual it’ll give show you parameters (which I presume are the ones from the automagic setting) and I’ve been noticing that the focus distance is almost never the same as the material focus.
5 Likes
Did you have to run this item twice? once defocused to engrave, then a second time re-focused for cutting operations? Or is there settings in the software you can change for each operation individually?
5 Likes
Ive seen focus depth be somewhat off of material height for many materials on all job types (cut, score, engrave). It obviously seems to work well in this instance, so having it as part of the dialed in proofgrade settings makes sense.
Ive tried this before, but only as a second engrave to try to clean up the first focused engrave. Doing it as an initial engrave ended up way better than expected.
7 Likes
Focus height is set automatically to the height of the material based on the depth sensor on the head unless you specify in the UI a different height for each job (if you dont want it the height the sensor detects). I left the cut at the height detected by the sensor (default).
5 Likes
Not sure about how itll work on extruded, but it might actually be a bit clearer. Too low an LPI will undo the defocusing however, as the lines will be too far apart. This was at 340. worked great
6 Likes
I havent yet. It was for a friend and he was excited to take them home and test them out, but ill see if I can get him to take some photos
2 Likes
Wow!! What a difference!!
1 Like
holy crud the left side is so nice
2 Likes
This is why I continue to read the forums. Stuff like this that wld take me ages to figure out on my own, thx so much for sharing your findings @takitus. Is there a difference in length of time, if any, between focused(?) and defocused cuts?
9 Likes
It was just the engrave that was done unfocused, but there wasn’t any time difference at all. Just a big difference in surface quality =)
7 Likes
That is really amazing!
This is going to be a stupid question, I’m sure, but would this help other materials such as wood? I assume it works for acrylic because it melts, but could defocusing on wood give a smoother, more even burn too?
5 Likes
It could potentially help as the defocusing of the beam would cause it to have a larger spot size which would cause the ablated areas of each pass to overlap. I haven’t tried it but I think it could potentially work.
2 Likes
Wow that’s a far nicer result than usual. I’ve always been pretty uninspired by acrylic engraving because of the resulting texture so this is great to see!
3 Likes
Does it make any noticeable difference to the edges of the engrave? Technically it should slightly increase the kerf and round off the edges but I don’t think you’d notice in practice
3 Likes