Hey everyone, I just bought my second GF. The first was a basic and now I’ve added the Plus. One of the perks of the Plus is it’s supposed to engrave 2x faster. I just set up the same design on the same birch plywood and there is no difference in time. Both machines’ settings are (SPEED 1000 / POWER 30 / 105 lines per cm). I thought the Plus would unlock a faster speed setting and that’s what would cause faster engraves, but it still maxes out at 1000. How do I unlock the 2x speed?
I also just tested it on a bitmap. Only 10 minutes faster at 2700 speed than 1400. This seems like a scam. Basic time is 108 minutes, and Plus time is 58 minutes.
I hate to complain, but I was counting on this 2x speed. Even the advertising for the Pro says 3x speed. It’s all apparently misleading and false. I hope Glowforge contacts me here in the forums. I’m not happy with their lack of transparency.
It says “up to 2x faster engraving speed” or “enhanced top speed”, not “your jobs will finish in half the time”.
The engraving speed is in fact up to 2x faster. Your GF Plus has a higher top speed than a Basic. It’s roughly 8 inches per second on a Basic, versus 14 inches per second on a Plus, if I did the math right.
The caveat is that, when engraving, much of the time the print head is not at whatever speed you set: it’s either ramping up to that speed, or slowing down from that speed to turn around between passses. The wider your artwork/engraving is, the more time the print head will spend at the “2x faster” speed, where the narrower the artwork is, the more time it’ll spend ramping/decelerating between passes. So the job time is not going to be 50%, even though the advertising is truthful.
Both of your lasers have the same 40 watt tube. They produce the same amount of heat. If you speed up the job, you get a lighter mark. The fastest possible engraving speed isn’t super useful for wood, acrylic, or anything where you have to linger a while to get a good mark. You need a more powerful laser if you actually want to do the same job in half the time, so you can deposit the same amount of heat in less time.
But with what you have, make sure you try out the “MARGIN OPTIMIZATION” slider you see on that raster engrave settings screen. It defaults to maximum quality, which is slowest. By engraving while the print head is slowing down or speeding up, you can capture a bit more benefit from that enhanced top speed you now have. Slide it towards “minimize margin” and – again, depending on your artwork – you may see the job time go down even further.
I appreciate the detailed response. I understand that technically it’s 2x faster, but I guess with the small 12x20" bed there isn’t much room to see that. I’ll have to mess around with that Margin setting, but slowing down the print isn’t an option for me time wise. Right now I’m looking at a 7 hour engrave time at 1000 speed, so slowing that down isn’t attractive to me with that design. At least having a second laser cuts time in half. Definitely disappointed though. And unless this type of detailed explanation is given in the description on the website, I do think they are deceiving the general public. Definitely did it to me. Glad I didn’t go for a Pro.
I hear where you are coming from. Having followed this project from almost the beginning, I would agree with you that the 2x speed is a big promise but the “small print” in many cases makes it negligible.
