Ever since Glowforge sent me a replacement print head for some reason it no longer fully cuts through medium clear acrylic sheets. It’s not uniform though. It’s like there’s a gradient adjust of the power from left to right, where the right hand edge gets less power the further it hits over, which would make sense since that’s furthest from the laser source. The left hand edge is fine, fully cuts through.
I can compensate by slowing down the cut speed but sometimes if I forget to do this I end up with prints that don’t cut all the way through.
Usually that happens if the mirror behind the window on the left side of the gantry gets knocked out of whack during shipping. Are you sure the head is seated properly on the carriage? If there is any misalignment of parts the beam doesn’t hit the lens in the head squarely and this error gets magnified as it travels farther away from that window in the gantry.
That makes sense. This was printing fine in the old head - that had to be replaced due to a focus issue. I’ll have a go at examining the seating to see if there’s an issue with that.
It does sound like a slight misalignment somewhere. So slight that it cuts fine close to the left, but the further to the right it goes the more that misalignment is pronounced.
While you dance with support, try keeping your work to the left to get by.