Glowforge printing off on back side of material

When attempting to print something on the reverse side of an item, the print is off (to the left) about 1/16" (2 mm).

My methods are as follows: print and cut the front (which lines up perfectly with the GFUI), flip the material and put it back in the same hole I took it out of, align the new image in the GFUI leaving about 1/16" all the way around, set focus, and print.

I have tried proofgrade as well as non-proofgrade, cleaned all aspects of the machine, ensured the gantry was square, ensured the focus was set, refreshed the GFUI, cleared history/cache, and can’t figure it out. Can someone please help?

Instead of trying to visually place the new image on the printed piece, just load both front and back artwork into the GFUI together, line them up exactly on top of each other using the positioning tools (click the ruler at lower left), set the back artwork to “ignore” while you engrave the front, flip the piece over, and ignore the front and engrave the back. If the artwork is lined up, the print will also be lined up.

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Thank you!

This worked pretty well, but I would still like to know why?

The why is because you are aligning and then hitting set focus - those steps should always be reversed.

Set focus tells the camera which part of the board you care the most about - so it focuses there. When you align before setting focus you are using the default camera view which is only perfect directly under the camera lens.

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I may have misspoke. It should say, “…set focus, align, then print.”

Then it shouldn’t. Have you run the camera calibration? Most folks end up with sub-millimeter variance after that.

I will say though, even if you run the calibration the method that @geek2nurse described is always the right answer. It will be dead-on because there is 0 realignment with that method.

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Tutorial on it here:

Thanks for the answers @Jules and @geek2nurse! Those are both excellent solutions to engraving perfectly on both sides of material. I’m going to close this thread - if any additional questions arise, go ahead and post a new topic. Thanks for letting us know about this!