New material auto calibration

Cast is best for raster engraving…but excruded is supposed to have a cleaner cut. It depends on the thickness. These are cut and rastered on 1/8" clear plexi. Cuts just fine.

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There is truth to that… when I engrave on red material ie sign material with white as the second layer, it will always take two passes since the laser (which is a red wave length) reflects off the red pigment and leave alot if the red layer behind…second pass cleans it right up :grinning:

Alot of the more expensive lasers like epilog and Universal come with a list of materials settings but they also state that they are starting points…I’ve always have had to do tweaking to get it perfect…and as the laser gets older and the laser looses power, they need to be tweaked again.
Once I get my GF Im sure I wont be the only one posting the more common material settings although there will need to be a different set for the basic (lower laser power) since I’m getting the pro.

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@dan makes an interesting comment here: “material removal is nonlinear”. I see many examples of what I presume are GF engraved materials, and some of those engraved patterns contain a mix of open and narrow areas, yet the apparent depth of the engrave seems consistent. Was there a lot of math/physics/tweaking involved to get that looking good?

non-linear doesn’t mean inconsistent. It means that if 20% power engraves a 1/8" deep cleft, that does not translate directly to 40% power engraving a 1/4" deep cleft.

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Sorry, I should’ve included the full quote from @dan, the gist of which is concurrent cuts will thermally pile up and change the engrave depth due to the heat accumulation from a raster pattern. So the depth for a given power level will depend on the shape of the area being engraved. That has me curious how much tweaking and fiddling would be required to properly engrave a particular pattern - test structures may not correlate well to the actual pattern being engraved.

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Ah, that part I am also curious to experience. :slight_smile: