This is a birch plywood 1/8 I got on Amazon. I have tried so many settings and keep getting issues like this and not cutting through.
Not all wood is laser friendly. Also, Glowforge does not recommend cutting 1/8" plywood in the Aura. From the Glowforge page:
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Birch is tougher than many other woods. There is a real need to set our sights on what your machine can easily cut, and not so much the toughest challenges, otherwise it will always be struggling. My pro will cut 7/16" birch or walnut but it is a giant pain as that is the maximum while 1/8" - 1/4" is much more reliable.
To cut 1" or more thickness would cost two or three times as much for the machine but I could think about cutting real furniture and one hundred times as much I could make furniture in metal but you will not do so with an Aura, or even a pro no matter how hard you try.
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Generic “birch” plywood simply has a birch outer veneer, the inside is often not defined. Quality plywood will specific what’s between those layers - and GF states their own 1/8 (“Medium”) has an MDF core, which would make it a poor choice for the Aura.
I used to have a local source for 3mm “Baltic” birch that had layers of hardwood veneer, but that source dried up when events unfolded in Europe. It’s still out there but not worth the price for me. As I have an original Pro, I can cut many materials the Aura would not. Even still, I consider it optimized for 1/8" or so materials, even though I can use thicker now and then. The Aura is really a much “lighter-duty” machine.
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