Aloha!
I made the common mistake and saw an object then said, I CAN MAKE THAT!
So “that” is a layered camper trailer. What I can’t seem to do is make an angled line to the width I want.
Here are the 4 ways I have found out how NOT to do it, I just need the one way to make it work.
#1. I have an engraved “racing stripe” bisecting the camper. I thought I would just use Bezier tool to make the stripe. It backfills the space between the start and finish line making an oblong trapezoid. which I do not want.
#2. Somehow, I got the backfilled trapezoid to disappear, but even when I make my Stroke line “fat”, GF renders it skinny. (See skinny line under my fat stripe).
#3. I made some boxes to look like the stripe I want, but where they intersect, the GF will not engrave (see finished product)
#4. I have tried to: Group the boxes. Path-Union. Various combos of Raise/Lower. Path-Combine and even tried to drop a tiny box on the “joints” but GF will not engrave where the boxes intersect.
So, the short question is, how do I make this racing stripe with 2 angles in it, and have it engrave?
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There are a couple different ways to do this in Inkscape. Make a rectangle as wide and long as the first line. It looked like your racing stripe is rounded, so I rounded the corners on this one.
Copy and paste it. Make it as long as the angle part. Then click on the new rectangle to get the rotate arrows and drag a corner arrow until you have the angle you want.
Then drag it over until you snap the bottom corners together.
Paste the original rectangle again and snap the top corners together. Then do a Ctrl+A to select all of them and do a Path->Union.
Go to the Fill and Stroke menu and do a fill.
I uploaded it to my glowforge and it looked good. Obviously I didn’t actually engrave it. It seems you tried this and it left your joined areas unengraved. My guess is if you inspect the drawing in Inkscape you’ll see some artifacts. Even with mine, you’d still want to go in with the edit path tool and clean up the extra nodes to smooth out the corners.
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That is exactly what I was going to say, but you said it with pictures!
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I would recommend drawing a line of the desired width with rounded corners and end caps. Then you could just do stroke to path and you’ll get exactly what you’re looking for with no messy artifacts.
This is literally about a 30 second operation.
Unfortunately I’m not at my computer so I can’t provide pictures of it but that’s how I would attack it.
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You’ve got a couple of answers on how to do this, but I wanted to comment on your specific points.
The 
will attempt to close open shapes, it doesn’t always do it the same way each time, so it’s always best to make sure you’ve done it yourself.
The easiest way is to use @evansd2 suggestion below. After you’ve drawn your curve, go into Fill and Stroke > Stroke Style and change the width to what you want the final engrave to be. Then click Path > Stroke to Path. You now have a closed object that matches your curve exactly.
The doesn’t recognize stroke widths (if you ever want to see what you’re actually sending to the laser, go to View > Display Mode > Outline), so follow @evansd2 suggestion and click Path > Stroke to Path and you’re good to go.
This is what @caribis2’s suggestion fixes.
Oddly enough, if the boxes are grouped it won’t work but as long as you select all three of your boxes individually Path > Union should do exactly what you want.
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True exactly as written, but it will work if you enter the group and union them in the group’s scope.
Then you’d have a group that contains your one path.
This isn’t useful for most situations except when designing using clones and future proofing. Which isn’t what’s going on here, but anyway.
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