Power for Maple Plywood question

So I am a bit baffled. Started using the GF and when engraving Medium Maple Plywood on like 70 power it hardly makes a dent. Also the score that I put around it doesn’t make the laser cut all the way through. First, does the thickness of the red line I make in Inkscape for the cut line matter? I made it just one or two pixels wide figuring a cut is a cut…but maybe I am wrong. And second, does anyone know what settings are supposed to give me a decent-depth engrave? (I know plywood isn’t the best for engraving, but for my purposes it is good enough. Thanks~

The power you list really isn’t relevant without the speed. And you can substitute deeper for darker in this graphic.

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That is exactly what a score is - a cut that doesn’t go all the way through…

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Super graphic. Good teaching tool.

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A great graphic! The only Issue I see is that the speed only goes to 1000, But what would be really neat is to work out the area of the triangle that would have the same effect in darkness or depth of the cut :thinking:

Awesome, thanks…I wasn’t taking speed into consideration.

You may find the First Three Prints helpful - they will take you through all the different settings/types on the :glowforge: using pre-made designs

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I made that pre speed update.

Working it out would require an independent one for each material :slight_smile: but definitely doable if the power settings are linear and consistent to real output. You’d really need more of a tabular display.

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It would take dedicated research but I was thinking in terms of color/numbers then it would be easy to assign a color/number for each material. There would be some vaugery that slower speed would increase power more for some than others for example, but in general it would be useful for any material. Just a whole bunch of work that would be as appreciated as much as bed pins.

Since you are using Proofgrade medium maple plywood, I think you should use the proofgrade settings - engrave 1000/full power, score 125/21. cut 168 full for pro model.

I find little use for the higher speeds. I loose too much real estate. And you have to also account for margin settings.

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That’s a great graphic to help, @jbmanning5, thanks for sharing.
@ros1111, I hope this helps. You may also want to take a look at our page for working with Manual Mode here at working with manual mode, which explains these settings more in-depth. I’m going to close this thread - if you run into any other issues feel free to open a new topic or contact us directly at support@glowforge.com.