OK. Don’t point and laugh, I’ve got a noob question that I think would be good to have confirmed or just to educate myself.
When it comes to Power and Speed, there is actually nothing functionally different between an Engrave at Full power 200 Speed and a Cut at Full power 200 Speed and a Score at Full power and 200 Speed?
The laser doesn’t actually have three different power “sets” that it chooses the settings from, correct? (i.e. Full power Engrave is throttled down to an Engrave “range” of “acceptable” power levels, Full Power Cut utilizes the entire power of the laser tube, and Score has a different power range?)
I could be asking this all wrong and I apologize. If it’s not clear, I’ll try and ask it a different way.
hmmmm, not what I was trying to go for. I’ve had my GF for a few months now and I’m pretty sure I’ve got this part down, but I was wondering if I have three of the same outlines of an image (no fill at all), choose the same settings for Engrave on one image, score on another image, and cut on the third (i.e. Full Power, 200 Speed), Will all three of them look identical?
I know that the cut and the score will trace the actual image, and engrave will do single line by single line from front to back. But will the finished product look completely identical once they are all done?
I’ll probably test this at some point, but wanted to see if I could get an answer here first before I set up that test.
As far as I’ve noticed the only thing that changes between the Engrave and the Cut/Score is how the laser moves. Engrave is a fill in by “coloring” back and forth so that a large area gets filled. For Cut/Score you get a single path that follows along the line. (I know you know, but for anyone else reading this.)
But you want to use much faster speeds with Engraving to keep from torching things. Trying to use the Cutting speeds on an engrave at the same power is going to burn all the way through the material, back and forth. So you’ll see different scales on those.
But you can make a Score with the Cut function if you know what settings to use to keep from burning all the way through the material. I’ve done it a few times when I was feeling lazy.
OK, I went ahead and just did a test file. Three boxes, each one set at 1 Power and 500 Speed.
Conclusion #1, Effectively they look identical to one another. The entire “job” took 1 minute and 32 seconds. Of that time, 1 minute and 29 seconds was pretty much just the engrave doing it’s box (just the outline, no fill). The Score and Cut together only took about 3 seconds total.
Conclusion #2: Score and Cut both had “hot spots” in the corners of the boxes where the direction changed and the beam was in one place for a split second longer. The Engraved box has zero hot spots.
Final Conclusion: If you set the same power and speed regardless of whether you chose Engrave, Cut, or Score, the end results will be VERY close to the same. However, Engrave will take an exponentially longer time to get the same result, but it will make it a little bit cleaner than Score or Cut. But that has nothing to do with the actual power delivered and more to do with the method of getting there.
