Power changes when doing 3d Engrave on PG acrylic (banding)

Hello All,

Wondering if anyone else has this issue, I did a 3D engrave on PG medium white acrylic and I got some banding that happened. I had seen this before but not as pronounced. I fixed this by scraping the bands down with a tool, however you can still see the banding.

What is strange is it happened like 3 inches up into the print for about an inch and a half and then again near the end of the print in the text at the top. The text was all the same color (so the same depth).




It goes straight across the photo, again I have smoothed these down they were very pronounced.

I want to cut another one but I don’t know if I want to waste another 2.5 hours and the material on a test.

This is my second GF Pro, the first one had a problem cutting all the way through. This one appears to be okay, however this is a problem. The machines sound changed through the print too, almost like it was turning the cooling on and off maybe? Could that be causing an issue like this?

Also I have the GF plugged straight to the wall, should I try to condition the power via a pure sine UPS first? (I would get one rated for over 800Watts if so).

Thanks for your time.
Greg

Yes. For some reason the machine introduces artificial banding even in solid areas - the example here uses rectangular vector objects. It varies by lpi. This was also Proofgrade acrylic. Acrylic shows the problem more than natural materials.

You can see it in the deeper (PG 3D engrave) sections of this piece, for example:

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Is the banding going 90 degrees to the engrave direction? I saw a tile someone had done the other day that had similar banding throughout that went vertically (90 degrees to the engrave direction). That’s a tough one to chalk up to external factors, which one would assume would create horizontal banding.

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It’s in both directions, horizontal and vertical, as shown in both my images and the OPs above.

The “intensity” or pronouncedness in each direction varies by LPI setting.

Got it. The horizontal is way less noticeable to me, maybe because how apparent the vertical is.

Were those pure black (0,0,0 RGB)? Was it full power or less than full power/precision power? Might be interesting to compare full power to 100 power, since the precision power levels use software PWM, I believe, and full power uses hardware PWM.

My test piece is rectangle vector objects, no fill, full (pro) power, just changing LPI. It was engraved rotated 90Âş from how it reads.

The most noticeable areas on my design piece are solid black, but you can see the same banding on the lesser shaded areas as well.

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I’m sorry to see that your print didn’t turn out the way you expected. We’re seeing this too, and the team is looking into it now.

In the meantime, you can try rotating the artwork slightly, by just a few degrees so that the lines are no longer vertical or horizontal. This should help you get the best results for your intended settings.

I’m going to close this thread now; if you run into any other trouble please open a new topic or email us at support@glowforge.com. Thanks so much for letting us know about this!

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