How to get Glowforge to engrave a piece

[thinkspotrules]

Hello Glowforge world. I have a design that includes a set of lines I would like the Gloeforge to engrave on the particular piece I’m working on. The lines to be engraved appear in Blue on the screen and the machine appears to move back and forth where the lines should be, but the machines laser does nothing but back and forth. The laser appears not to be “firing” ,Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

[eflyguy]

There are a bunch of things that could cause it. What are your power settings? Is it a vector or bitmap design? If vector, are you certain there aren’t two overlapping images? How was the file created? Is the design itself fitting within the engravable area (that’s unlikely if it’s going thru the motions…)

Need a lot more info.

[dklgood]

Is there any chance at all that your design was duplicated and two copies of the same file are stacked one on top of the other?If so, the printhead will move as if engraving but the laser doesn’t fire. Another possibility is that the lines you want engraved are vector paths rather than rasters. The Glowforge will engrave filled shapes, but not single line vector paths.If you open a different file and the engraved elements engrave as normal your machine is working normally and the problem is with the file.

[rbtdanforth]

@thinkspotrules

The lines to be engraved appear in Blue on the screen and the machine appears to move back and forth where the lines should be,

I think you would do better to use Score instead of Engrave. If a line is narrow Engrave will just leave a row of dots, first on one line and then on the other line.

[ca_worth]

is the laser power set? sometimes an errant mouse click and you set power to zero, which isn’t going do anything.

[cynd11]

Here’s something to think about: in order to engrave, the design needs a closed image to fill in. If you want to engrave a line, it needs to be a skinny rectangle that you can fill in. No matter how wide the line appears in your design software, the Glowforge will only see it as a hairline of extremely small (like 0.01”) width. You can get an idea of how it’s going to appear in the Glowforge by viewing your design in Outline mode in your design software. If you can accept a very narrow line, as @rbtdanforth suggests switch the engrave to a score in the Glowforge interface.