Just did my first cut in Medium Acrylic PG and it did not cut all the way through.
A few days ago I ran a test of the Founders Ruler on Medium Draftboard expecting it to fail. However it printed perfectly.
With that successful test I ran a design on Medium Acrylic tonight and it did not cut all the way through, So I’m wondering if I should slow the speed down and try again or wait until the GF team can look at my machine.
How is everyone else doing with Medium Clear Acrylic PG?
Since you are using Proofgrade, you might want to check a couple of things - the acrylics tend to cut through without some of the issues that you can see with wood.
You might want to try this suggestion from @Rita for your next tests:
I often slow acrylic down about five to ten zooms just to be sure on mission critical jobs, especially if there are lots of small radii at the end of a long process. Not scientific or anything, just experience. I have great luck with Proofgrade settings on thick acrylic and thin acrylic for simple cuts and large paths. It seems that when I connect complicated vectors with some engravings, I might not have 100% success. It’s been a while since I have tested all these lately.
That said, there may have been something messing with the process that hasn’t been identified. Only way to check is keep testing.
Rita’s suggestion said make sure everything is clean and try it again.
For a long time I had problems with Medium Draftboard amd Medium Maple Ply not cutting all the way through. Thick DB worked fine though. I took the advice to just slow the speed down by 10% and that was working pretty well. I noticed a lot of posts about PG not cutting through so last week I did a thorough cleaning and ran a test of the founders ruler so I could post my results to the forum and hopefully get support to fix my PG issue. It worked flawlessly so I didn’t pursue it any further. Thought that perhaps there had been some tweaking going on by GF.
Since that test I have run one project on Medium Maple Ply and it was perfect. I did another small engrave test on Medium Maple Ply and that was fine. That is all that has happened since my last cleaning of the machine.
The Medium Clear Acrylic didn’t cut anywhere near through at any point. Even though I have not cleaned the lenses and mirrors since last week (only about 20-30 minutes of print time since) I think that this print is completely off.
BTW I’m not ranting, in case this comes across as being angry, I’m not.
I tried the print again slowing the speed down by 10% and it cut fine. So with PG acrylic I feel like I’m back to square one and that I’ll have to adjust the speed for each job. First world problem I know, however if I need to manually adjust every job what is the point of PG? Especially if some PG works fine and some doesn’t.
PG Medium Maple Ply = Perfect.
PG Medium Clear Acrylic = Not so good.
I am surprised 10% speed change makes that much difference but it is hard to do a 10% speed reduction because the units are obscured. A 10% change in zooms will be a bigger change in speed at low speeds. At higher speeds it will tend towards 10%.
Yes its crazy. The speed values seem to have been chosen and rounded with the primary concern of making the GUI look neater and with no consideration to usability. A linear scale without an offset would be much easier to reason about. And why round user input values when the PG settings are not round numbers.
The whole GUI is like that with as much hidden as possible, e.g. no scroll bars and functions hidden behind … It seems to be the way GUIs are going, form over function. How that is supposed to be easier to use I don’t know.
I’m a software engineer (Jones here, not Sarah) and I have learned a few things about GUIs over the years.
If you provide an option or setting then someone will use it(or misuse it).
If you allow the user do a bad thing they will.
If a user doesn’t understand the options they will try them all.
If a user has no idea how to operate the software they will just keep clicking on things until something looks familiar.
Options without explanation frustrate users and keep them in the dark about how to use the software correctly.
That’s a very small list. I think the trend is to build a user interface to the lowest common denominator and taking away all options reduces the likelihood of someone doing the wrong thing. I prefer education and tend to expose “advanced” interfaces and allow the user to choose the level they are comfortable with. Although that doesn’t always work. Especially with machine control where the result could have serious consequences.
That is true of the “Manual Settings” for the GFUI. They are not officially supported, so the only documentation about their use is from forum members via ‘click and burn’ experimentation.
I’m curious if there was something else I needed to do for this to be seen by support? I might not have read the instructions thoroughly and missed an important step but I understood that posting to this forum was effectively raising a support ticket.
This hits home. (I was down to about two usable inches on AI at one point.)