We are new to Glowforge- loving it so far. What do the line settings mean? We are engraving on bamboo cutting boards and the engraving doesn’t seem dark enough. Scare is too muh.
Welcome to the forum.
LPI means lines per - lines of engraving per inch of material. For some materials, a very high lpi is required, for other materials and purposes, fewer lines per inch are indicated. Obviously, the higher the lpi the longer the job is going to take because engraving is slow and engraving 450 passes per inch is really slow. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish and what material you are using you make adjustments to find the point that you have the fastest turnaround without giving up the quality you desired.
Bamboo is grass, not wood, and engraves unevenly. Testing is about the only answer and it will only be the answer for the bamboo that you are using at the time. The next batch could be different.
Read through the manual settings explanation so you know that slower speed, or higher power will get a deeper engrave. https://support.glowforge.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033633574-Working-With-Manual-Mode
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Thank you very much for this information
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Score is just one line no different than a cut but much more shallow. As noted Bamboo is a grass and the color of the burn can vary widely even over a few millimeters. This is actually true of any wood but bamboo is extreme.
As for LPI there is a wide range of views. I routinely go for 675 to 1355 if I do not want to see “grain” of the engraving that will show up even at 450 LPI depending on species while 35LPI will have the lines ~1 millimeter apart which for some cases is plenty.
As also noted speed and power are also variables to make the pitch harder or lighter. If you engrave as dots the LPI makes the dots smaller or bigger and thus a much more controlled shading as with a photograph as every dot is the same black but more or less scattered to set the grayscale, as to try to set shade by depth of burn is a very tiny distance at the top and just charcoal the rest of the way down, with the grain of the material being much more pronounced than the heat of the burn.
However long it takes to engrave (and it can take several hours) you will be looking at it for much longer when it is done.
Thank you very much!
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