I’m not sure when this unusable zone came into existence but it has GOT to go! It’s interfering with cutting large files and I can’t get as many designs on the surface as I used to!
Is there any way to avoid this? If not, how can we get GF to give this the axe?
Seeing as you said buffer, you might be referring to the engrave, not cut, limits. Those haven’t changed either, they depend on the engrave speed. The head has to decelerate then accelerate again at the end of each pass. The higher the speed, the smaller the engrave area.
The no-engrave zones are required to accommodate head acceleration/deceleration.*
The faster the engrave speed, the wider the zones, so reducing the speed setting will recover some, but not all, of the useable space at the cost of increased time.
*note to the physicists that are about to object to “deceleration”: don’t even start.
They could probably reduce the buffers by releasing new versions of the laser head and carriage that have less mass. After that it would just be software changes. They’re never going to do it, but they could.
I don’t recall ever getting those sizes (except for pass-through work). Mine has always been a hair under 11 and 19 1/2. I expect @eflyguy has the right sizes for real life vs GF’s published #s.