I’m sure other folks have found this out on their own, but I wanted to highlight it for anyone who has not!
I’m not sure if it’s a function of the much faster engrave speeds, but I found that rotate an engrave sped up a large by a factor of six!
This should be intuitive for me by now, but I’d prototype a design as a one off, perfected it, and then wanted to gang up a sheet to make a number at once. The most efficient “nesting” seemed to be to run a series rotated so that the type engraving ran along the y access, not the x (that is along the shorter dimension). In testing, I’d engraved across the x access, which I knew would likely be faster.
The “y” access engraving job was predicted at just over two hours. I reworked the Illustrator file to perform all type and other straight engraving almost entirely on the x axis, and the total time dropped to about 23 minutes!
In the past, I’m sure I’ve seen some differences, sometimes noticeable, but have opted for the best use of material. Here, it was just a matter of fixing some overlapping lines and rotation. Really significant change.
Has anyone else seen this speed up in the x vs. y difference or have I just not done enough engraving of longer bits of text and other material to find the difference so far?
This is a well-documented phenomenon. It has to do with all the time you spend accelerating and decelerating, and is especially pronounced on engraves at higher speed.
I’m going to blame the forum search engine—or bad search terms on my part. I searched on similar topics (and even had a bunch of unrelated ones suggested), and did not get matches that applied.
I wasn’t sure if the engraving speed up affected this too! You think not? Thanks for all the references!
The higher engrave speeds can drastically slow down smaller jobs. The head needs more space to slow, reverse, then speed up again. That’s why the workspace shrinks so dramatically. Plus, there are very few use cases for the highest speeds as you need high power to engrave most materials.
