Finally using my glowforge on precut hockey sticks for a few hockey teams. I have set a placement template so it would be repetitive. The sticks are 1/2" Baltic Birch. When I have them on the bed I can see the sides of some of the sticks on the screen from the fisheye displacement. I import the engraving files to the bed but it doesn’t line up. If I center on the middle one the others are all off. visually. Once I cut the centered one is actually off and the one below is centered. How to i better the alignment when the camera isnt giving me a true flattened view.
I had them on the honeycomb tray. I set the material height to 1/2" and the focus height is 1/8" if that matters. I imagine the taller it is towards the camera the more it distorts, but I need to find a way to precisely engrave onto precut material so I am not having to cut one by one and I also want them all aligned in the same spot on the sticks.
Since this problem is being seen on materials that were purchased from another company, we can’t offer support for prints that don’t come out as expected. Materials may vary widely from piece to piece, even if they’re created by the same manufacturer. I’m going to move it to Beyond the Manual so other folks here can help. Should this happen with a print on Proofgrade materials, please open a new ticket in Problems and Support and we’ll help you right away!
The material is irrelevant. I am trying to engrave on something and where the camera shows the material is, it isn’t engraving where it should be. What would that have to do with the material? The issue is the way the fisheye is displaying and me not having enough experience with the machine to know what the issue is.
I do not have a pro so I have not tried something as large as a hockey stick. There is a post in here somewhere about how to to the math for cutting accurately with the crumb tray removed.
What I have noted is that when I work with my custom materials the measurements I enter really matter. If my cardboard (or whatever) is 4mm and I enter 5mm… the camera “sees” it different and things are not spot on.
You are pretty much there if you’ve made a jig… you just need to put your engrave jobs in the same file as the jig. Don’t try to align them manually. Align them within the design to the jig.
Not sure why you setting focus height to .125, unless you purposefully want a defocused job.
what should that focus height be? The same as the material thickness?
Yes, same as material height. Unless you want to purposely cause the beam to be out of focus (sometimes you do). But, for an engrave like this, I would think you’d want it to be in focus.
And the material height is the same if it is on the crumb tray or not? Im trying again with no crumb tray so its farther from the camera
The crumb tray is considered the zero point, so material height and focal height are based off of the crumbtray being zero.
ok so I tried with no crumb tray, sized my file to match the layout of the jig, and its engraving into the pvc below the stick. What am i doing wrong. I have had no issues cutting parts and engraving on flat sheet but why cant i align a sized file to a cut part?
You need to account for and make up the height of the crumb tray. Measure the thickness of your crumb tray with calipers or a ruler. Measure the thickness of your hockey stick and jig. If the crumb tray is thinner, subtract the thickness of the crumb tray from the hockey stick and jig height. That’s the material thickness and your glowforge will engrave on it’s surface. If the stick and jig are thinner, build them up until they are a couple of mm above crumb tray thickness, measure, and subtract the crumb tray height.
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The camera distortion makes perfect visual alignment pretty difficult, but if your cut lines and subsequent engrave lines are all aligned in your artwork, and you’ve set the material height correctly, then as long as you don’t move the material or artwork between steps everything will line up on the finished product (even when it might not look like it when you’re viewing the initial cuts along with the artwork onscreen).
There are lots and lots of forum threads on getting perfect alignment using jigs, as well as on cutting without the crumb tray. A little time spent browsing would probably save you a lot of frustration. 
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