Some three-ish years ago I was envisioning that brilliance of the computing power+optics sorcery that would allow my glowforge to recognize what I was cutting when I flipped it over to cut from the other side. The shape of the object would be the registration or something…
Yeah. It doesn’t go quite that slick, and the double-sided cut - as advertised - isn’t quite here yet. But you can do it with snapmarks, which means you can creatively do it with a jig taped/pinned/magnet secured to your bed.
This realization came dawning upon me as I looked at a stack of 25 bad cuts. Sometimes cuts don’t go all the way through, whether due to knots or voids in the material, or because my laser really needed to be cleaned and I didn’t know about how to clean the mirror inside the head. (yep - 16 months of use without a wipe-off. Youch.)
I’m making 200 flat-pack business card display stands for a client, engraved both sides with fiddly little cutouts. And there was a stack of 25ish wasted quarter sheets staring at me.
My baltic birch isn’t as slick as materials; but the client can’t afford proofgrade. Because of my cleaning problems, I had surpassed an acceptable rate of bad cuts. And we know what some folks in this community think about wasted material…
“Hmmm,” I said to myself. I am using snapmarks on this project already.
Time to make a snapmark variation jig that will allow me to cut from the back of these failed prints. (I wanted to re-cut from the back for multiple reasons: less smoke and flashback than coming back through from the same side, running into the same knots, charring the sides of existing cuts, sub-milimeter variance is still visible when going on the same lines… it just seems like a better fix to sneak in from behind.)
BOOM. That pile of wasted material from bad cuts? It’s been converted to the good stack.
It took some time; but I actually assigned a different color to each little square, so that in a piece that needs only one or two little rectangles to be knocked back through, I only cut that box out. Seems tedious; but then it’s a 6-8 second cut to fix the problem, rather than several minutes for the entire design, and again, less charring and flashback.
I am going to use this process to get through 1/4" BB ply, which has been a problem for my Basic model all along.
I’ll probably use this for registration of that 1/4" ply.
So there it is, another use case for snapmarks.