Hello,
I am somewhat new to acrylic engraving and I am having a bit of trouble.
I keep getting lines going through my image and cannot figure out why.
I’m using medium thickness proofgrade acrylic and using standard GF settings for the .PNG image.
Please see attached photos. Sorry about the curse words; it’s for a client.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Is this a bitmap? How did you source it? I’ve seen stuff like this in SVGs when paths aren’t closed correctly.
Is it only this image?
And you should do us all a favor and blur the profanity. It really is out of place on this forum as it is intended and is put into practice.
Is that how it appears in the GFUI when the engrave settings are selected or does it look like it will be fully engraved?
Chuckle! Looks to me like the machine objects! 
In all seriousness, are you using the high speed engrave? Reduce the speed to around 1000-1500 if so and see if it helps. A PNG file will not have the issue of open paths, although that looks like a vector image.
(completely irrelevant post follows. I missed the gaping holes in the engrave!!)
It’s an unfortunate artifact of the engrave process when using the “vary power” option, there’s nothing wrong the file or settings. It also shows up most on acrylic. Take a look at the deep engraved sections in the close-up of this little piece I made last night. There’s simply no way to avoid them, it’s a result of how the files are converted for printing.
You can, however, correct them post-engrave with a flame from a small torch, but that takes practice and would damage the surrounding un-engraved area in your design.
You can also run another pass at a different focus level to “soften” the engrave, but that also takes a lot of experimentation and with the more recent “auto focus”, seems incredibly difficult to do with any consistency.
Take a second look at the OP’s photo. It’s not the usual small bit of banding through an engrave. It’s a 10" tall design and entire chunks of it are missing.
It looks like it will be fully engraved. It’s not SVG so I know it’s not an open path problem. At least I don’t think so…
It started as an SVG but then converted to PNG. Could that be the issue?
Hummmm. In that case I would check the file very carefully to make sure you don’t have overlapping vectors hidden underneath the raster image. Sometimes when you use Inkscape to convert a file to a bitmap, the originals remain underneath the copy, and that will confuse the Glowforge software and make parts get dropped.
Thank you so much for the details. I’m looking into it now. As soon as I have more information I’ll update this thread.
I use vary power about 95% of the time and have never had entire chunks missing from the engraving. I don’t think this is the normal LPI lines you can see with focused engraving on acrylic.
It’s not. I didn’t see that in the image he posted (!!!) - I was even looking at the enlarged version for the kind of issue I’m talking about. 
Thank you so much for your patience as we reviewed the trouble you were running into.
Unfortunately, it looks like your unit is experiencing an issue that we can’t resolve remotely. I want you to have a reliable unit, so I’m recommending we replace this one. I’ll be in touch via email to sort out the details. I’m so sorry about the bad news.
