It is hard to tell but the second batch has a bad blue haze still on them and the edges of the engrave came out fuzzy. I used the same settings twice and the material is the same. Is this an issue of running 2 2 1/2 hour prints back to back? Or what could my issue be?
Did you clean the lens and windows between the two large jobs? If the lens is a little hazy or obscured (from a 2+ hour job) it might defocus a little and not have quite the same power, so it wouldn’t burn as deeply and cleanly.
If you do not shift the material or design, you can do a second rapid speed engrave at low power to clean up the little bits of leftover haze, or just check the lens and windows to maybe give them a wipe before starting the next large job.
You might need to clean your air assist fan. The haze is from the hot smoke / burn residue moving over the surface, so if it’s not blowing adequately you’d get that.
Yes I think the second pass would work but I cant afford a 2 1/2 hour job (that already takes too long for the job its doing) to now take 5 hours. Which lenses would you recommend looking at or cleaning? All of them?
Perhaps clean the work as well? If that is the bottom of an engrave you are doing great! Also you can run a score with the engrave 0.05 or less inside. That way the score will leave a sharp edge and not take more than minutes.
With vectors you have 3 choices, you can cut, score, and engrave. Score is just a cut that is not deep, but it has its own settings. Like a cut it just follows a line and can match the speed and temp of the engrave. So following a line should have not have any jaggies.
Glowforge can’t make fire not make smoke. Best you can do is keep the important parts clean. There are also masking tricks that would help, but that would be more fiddly than just regular cleaning.
Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve hit a snag. I see you’ve also emailed us, I’m going to close that request so the conversation can continue here.
There are some excellent suggestions from our other forum users.
Would you let us know if clearing the Air Assist Fan and optics helps resolve the print inconsistencies?
It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.