I just unwrapped my Glowforge Pro yesterday and set it up. I’m trying to print earrings with a lot small details. I did a search of the forum for tips on how to print earrings like this (given I perhaps should have tried a different first project). My question is this: I printed my first one and it printed great. I used the same setting and it burned the first two earrings.
I’m using PG Medium Basswood, Speed 200, Power 97. I realize this isn’t the standard settings for this product but I was hoping that with the laser moving faster, it wouldn’t burn quite as bad.
Unless your lines are WAY too small (like .1" or so) it’s possible there’s something off with your art. If you don’t mind, you could post it here and someone could check it for duplicate lines or extra nodes or something else.
There was someone just the other day having issues with custom settings while PG ones worked fine - so as the difference between 97 power and 100 power is pretty small, the first thing I’d try is going back to PG settings and see if it works again.
If it does not then you’ll want to open a new post in Problems & Support (unless you’ve already sent an email to support@gf - if you have, wait until they respond and answer their questions there). Print a Gift of Good Measure (GOGM) (it’s free in your dashboard) on the PG material and post pictures of both the front and the back and the time you did it here in the forum. The staff uses that as a standard QA tool because they know the settings and the art are good, they can eliminate those as issues.
Your file had 2 layers of lines on top of each other. It should not go over the same place twice.
Try this file :o)
Click on the file or image above with the other mouse button the save the SVG file
At a quick glance I’m going to guess it’s because there are so many nodes - think of the laser pausing for a millisecond on each node…and this is what the leaves look like:
Now, you’ve lost some of the pointy ends, which may be important so you may want to do some editing to move the remaining nodes to the points like this:
What’s interesting is, it looks like you’d already done this on some of the other designs:
Thanks @nancielaing and @deirdrebeth! In the future, how do I fix the file so there aren’t double lines and extra nodes? I use CorelDraw to create my files, which is similar to Inkscape. Can I take it into Illustrator and simplify it there?
Hi Amanda,
I don’t know much about CorelDraw or Inkscape. In Illustrator I used the direct select tool, the filled in arrow, to select a point and delete it. When there was a point under it I knew it was doubled. I copied all the earrings and then pasted a set to work on. I also altered the holes for the findings on some of them because when there is not much material around where the jump ring goes it tends to break.
This may be a silly question but if you have Illustrator already is there a reason you don’t want to create your artwork there to begin with? The results are usually cleaner vs. translating between programs.
You don’t need to take it into any other program and Corel can do the same thing Illustrator or the others can do. If you look for the “Object Manager” (usually on the right side of the screen) it will show you exactly how many objects there are. If you have a bunch of objects on the page and it’s confusing to know what’s what, just drag your cursor around each earring to select the whole thing and it’ll be highlighted on the object manager list. In my example you can see that it looks like I have only one red square, but when selected, you can see there are two of them selected on the manager list.
I’ve been using Corel for 20+ years. It’s what I’m used to. A design that I can make up in 5 minutes in Corel, easily takes me 5x as much time in Illustrator.
If you look for the “Object Manager” (usually on the right side of the screen) it will show you exactly how many objects there are. If you have a bunch of objects on the page and it’s confusing to know what’s what, just drag your cursor around each earring to select the whole thing and it’ll be highlighted on the object manager list. In my example you can see that it looks like I have only one red square, but when selected, you can see there are two of them selected on the manager list.
