Ultimately, the name on the laser doesnt really matter, other than for your own organizational purposes if you have multiple lasers.
Speaking to jtech, they tell me there are no problems running their lasers at 100%. So thats what i do for anything other than grayscale burns, unless it will burn through the piece or is scorching unduly. So I would up the speed (possibly substantially) and run it at 100%.
If you have not already, you can massively increase jerk and acceleration settings. Depending on how you’re pathing your laser jobs this can make a big difference.
Personally for a project that isnt a combination of laser and cut work, i prefer lightburn heavily over vectric. The more i use both, the more i feel that lightburn is just “smarter” about laser jobs, and i can still edit vectors and such in vectric ans carry them over. Lightburn has nice features like speeding up “travel” moves of the laser in ways that vectric doesnt seem to take advantage of, and i find their method of hatch patterning to be both more featured and more intuitive. Meanwhile vectric is simply awesome at handling vectors and modifications of vectors whereas lightburn’s node edit makes me mad.
That said, one thing you can do if youre not happy with burn times is changing your line spacing. If you have not already tried test burns with different line spacing, i suggest you do so. You may find that in some cases you may be able to cut your lines per inch in half with no discernible difference on the finished product, or even an improvement on the finished product. It may be a stylistic choices but some of your lettering looks a little well done, and not as crisp. The s’s seem to sort of lose definition and the uppercase A looks like the middle section is undersized. Run that sucker at 200 IPM and 100% after ratcheting up jerk and accel and see how it does.
Alternatively, try using the “laser endmill” strategy in vectric along with the engraving toolpath and a sparse hatch pattern and angles. Some very cool results can come from it. The laser endmill strategy is creating an endmill as a tool but just giving it the diameter of the laser, 0.0067 inches, very simple. Then use it in the other toolpath strategies. The jtech website will describe this in detail for pre- laser module vectric builds. You dont actually need the vectric laser module- in fact, while it has a few quality of life features, i dont care for it much at all, and i personally feel like vectric could make some upgrades in how smart it is, and doing things like automatically avoiding slow z plunges with the laser on and the like… the little things i forget to set up when i do use it. Also, for cutting, you can adjust z height with the profile toolpath and laser endmill strategy, but i do not believe you can with the laser module. I found adjusting z to stretch the legs of my diode lasers when cutting is highly beneficial.
Also vectric seems to pick weird orders to fill vectors at times, so i would change to filling patterns fully (or else it jumps around) or maybe trying rastering.
Here is an example of the surface from a sparse engrave pattern.
One other possible path is treating the surface of your wood with borax. Mix wayer and borax to dissolve the borax (no particular ratio but dont supersaturate the water or anything) and spray it on the workpiece and let it dry. You will now get much darker engravings with less power or a faster burn.
