I’ve noticed that some of my engrave steps lately seem a little to the left, within the larger design they are a part of. I’ve only noticed it with steps using the HD Engrave setting. Sometimes the drift varies, but I’ve had designs where I re-export and recreate the job to see the same effect. Whereas engrave steps I manually create settings for, and score lines and cuts are all spot on.
I make lots of little wheels, and it’s most evident when making a small car tire. The hub/rim is engraved in the center of a circle, and then the circle is cut out (order of steps is critical here, of course). But the center will be ever so slightly closer to one edge than another.
Some pictures to demonstrate.
These are 0.475 in width.
The top two tires here show the center very slightly off, they are just a little bulge-y on the right side.
The bottom tire is well centered. I could have sworn all of these were set to standard HD engrave, so the chunkiness on the bottom tire is odd, but I’m not going to claim it was HD without being 100% sure.
I admit it’s very subtle, I’ve just made so many of these I’ve noticed the recent difference in output.
I’ve verified the wheel engrave is centered in the cut out circle in the design file.
I’ve measured around the wheels with calipers, and they are circular to within 0.004 inches, so it doesn’t appear the shape is off. Also, I have noticed other HD details (on other designs) that drift a little, usually slightly to the left (viewing from the front of the unit).
I tried exporting the cut circle (from Inkscape) as a circle object and as a path, but that did not make any difference.
This may be within the tolerance of the machine, but it’s become distinctly more noticeable of late, which makes me wonder if it’s a sign of a mechanical issue.
My response has been to try and make more wheels and choose the best looking ones. As I said above, my own custom engrave steps don’t seem to suffer (very odd, I’m not aware the standard settings are handled any different), so obviously I need to just make my use my own settings and see if I get better results.
I was wondering if anyone else has seen this sort of behavior, moreso recently?
EDIT: I’ve included the svg of the pictured wheel just above this line, but even blown up it is teeny tiny, sorry if it makes a hard target for a mouse click.