See the image. Some of them come out really charred. Others have a beautiful engrave. I’ve tried splitting up the cut (If these were numbered 1-8, I cut 1, 3, 5, 7 in the first pass, then 2, 4, 6, 8 the next pass. I thought this might let the laser cool a little between each keychain). But that didn’t seem to solve anything. Any idea why there’s so much variation when the settings are all the same? Speed 100. Power 6 (which is already dialed down from the preset, which is 7.6, I think). Thanks for any insights…
Which machine do you have? What material is that? I can’t imagine engraving at 100 speed, that would be tedious. I typically use 1000 or thereabouts, and adjust the power as necessary.
The CO2 laser does not need to “cool” to produce consistent results, unless it actually overheats and then it will pause, but that happens long before you would see a difference in performance.
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My bad. This is just a little Aura. No CO2 here. It’s the Glowforge maple and cherry plywood.
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Sorry, then. I have never owned an LED laser but I can see how temperature could affect it from work I have done with lasers in other areas.
I would definitely run this by support for their advice.
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I would try:
A) make sure that the hobeycomb tray is very flat, not sitting on any debris anywhere
B) make sure that the material is very flat on the honeycomb tray, not bumped up anywhere and use magnets or pins or tape to hold it down very flat
C) Rasterize your engrave artwork so that instead of doing one at a time, it’ll go all the way across the width of everything in each pass.
Note that for aura, with this much engrave, I would definitely recommend that you pause between the engrave and cut to wipe down the rails with alcohol, it is prone to skipping around if the rails are not pristine.
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Had another thought - you could also try doing a test where you wait a significant amount of time between each “set” and see if that makes a difference.
I was also wondering if the smoke could be dirtying up the optics, no idea how well the craft machines are exhausting it.
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