Inconsistent proofgrade settings

I’ve noticed this before, but always wrote it off to other random things. I tell myself I should have cleaned my lenses first, or maybe I didn’t notice a warp in the board. But this time it’s incontrovertible, because I was running the same job on the 3 types of wood, and I checked carefully for warps and cleaned my lenses just before starting, because it was for a customer and I wanted to make sure it came out right.

The default proofgrade settings for walnut plywood aren’t comparable to those for other PG plywoods. I wasted a whole sheet of walnut last night because it didn’t cut through using the PG settings. As mentioned above I had just cleaned all the lenses, etc., the sheet was perfectly flat, and it detected the material correctly.

The same design cut in maple ply and cherry ply works perfectly at the standard proofgrade settings. Here’s a comparison of the cherry and walnut, to illustrate what I mean:

Note the holes for tabs are too close to the edge on the walnut because it’s been recut to get it out of the sheet. :frowning: Also the etching is too light – lots of lost detail on the walnut one (specifically look at the tree at upper right, the detail in the trillium petals, and the sun, as well as the frame outline on the righthand side), whereas the cherry comes out beautifully.

We should be able to count on comparable results on proofgrade materials using proofgrade settings – I can see a slight amount of variance in etching between different wood types, but for SURE the cut settings should actually cut through the wood they’re supposed to be tuned for!

:frowning:

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Were these masked when you cut them? (Asking because a couple days ago I had trouble with proofgrade settings for the clear acrylic, not cutting through the masking consistently on vertical cuts. Haven’t opened a thread with all details yet but need to do so).

Yes. I purposely left them masked, because on maple and cherry, engraving through the masking gave me good results. And cutting through paper masking should never be an issue, anyway!

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Yes that should not ever be a problem! Thanks for your reply, I hope you get this sorted, your design looks beautiful.

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I came onto the forum for a similar reason today. I cut a file from maple hardwood that cut perfectly. A similar file on cherry hardwood barely cut through, but only parts of it did not cut. It’s really frustrating to expect the PG settings to do their job and then have them fail and ruin an entire sheet of material.

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I’m sorry about the late reply! Thanks for letting us know about this. I really appreciate you taking the time to provide the details and photos; that’s very helpful. I’ve passed this on to the team and we’re looking into it now. Unfortunately, I don’t have any news to provide at this time. I’ll update this thread once we have more information. Thanks for your patience.