Engraving Question - Maple Cutting Board

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Hi all! First time posting and I hope this is the correct spot or someone can point me in a different direction.

I am messing around with some engravings on a maple cutting board and they are not engraving as I hoped (or expected!).

I drew an image in Adobe Illustrator and then added some font. When I engrave, the font is coming out much deeper (darker?) then the image. I am using the same settings for both.

Thick Maple Hardwood
Engrave - Draft - Speed 1000/Power 100/ LPI 340/ 1 pass

I attached a picture of my engravings (1 was the first time I tried it, made some adjustments to AI file and 3 is my most recent try).

Glowforge Engrave Example
Glowforge Engrave Example612Ă—816 137 KB

I am new to AI and Glowforge … so not sure where I am making the mistake! I appreciate any tips or insight. Thanks so much!

Reindeer Engrave Example

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Welcome to the community. Nice drawings! You might want to thicken the lines up, then rasterize the images. I think that would allow for a better engrave. Someone else in here may have other suggestions, as well.

Also, using draft settings will not give you as good results as SD or HD, although it will take them longer to complete.

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If you are engraving the file as-is, the reindeer will never be as dark as the text as they are red, which is 50% lighter than the black they be need to be.

Edit - I was incorrect, see below:

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Good point! I didn’t even think of that.

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You also might want to consider scoring instead of engraving for the deer.

You’d have to re-work the artwork… maybe redraw it as a single line. But scoring can be 1000x faster (maybe an exaggeration) than engraving.

Don’t just score this artwork though – you’ll end up with something that looks like this, which is probably not what you want:

Screen Shot 2022-11-29 at 3.29.49 PM
Screen Shot 2022-11-29 at 3.29.49 PM567Ă—880 40.6 KB

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If you do go this route, you might also want to learn about defocusing for a score. This can give you a thicker line for your score.

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I tried thickening up the lines and it already looks better. Also, I didn’t realize that draft settings will not give as good results. Thanks for the tip!

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I will try that! Thanks for your feedback :slight_smile:

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Ah, I didn’t even think about why I had them two different colors. I changed them both to black. I always think of the colors as “steps”. Can you explain a little more by what you mean the red is lighter?

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I just did a little more reading and I think I get what you mean now … the darker the color in the file, the deeper it will burn?

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I mis-spoke, sorry.

Color of paths does not affect vector engraves, only bitmap/raster. I just ran a test to verify.

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Gotcha! Thanks for your response. I edited my file and messed around with some of my settings and I am happier with the result now.

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