Hi friends!! I’m new here and this is my first post. I’ve had my elite foreman with the jtech 14W laser for a couple of months, but just now getting around to using the laser.
I have attached An image of the issue in which you can see that I set the zero point to the center of the workpiece, and the laser is leaving a burn line from center to the bottom right corner. This tells me the laser is firing prematurely and unnecessarily. Can someone help me understand why?
The art was an image imported into Vectric vcarve 12, and cropped to a 2x6" rectangle Down through the middle just to test before applying to the final piece. The material is a flattened and sanded piece of Siberian elm slab.
The tool path settings are:
Laser image
14W 55% power
150 ipm
raster 90° to burn cross grain
.0055 line spacing
The other strange thing about this is that it did not happen in previous tests, so I’m not sure what changed other than power, speed, and line spacing.
Things in advance I appreciate any help anyone can offer!
I don’t have your laser or software, but it sounds like you’re cutting vertically, and the laser is burning the bottom end of every line? In lightburn with my non-elite buildbotics controller machine, i’d adjust something called “overscan” to try to fix that. Not sure about with the Masso, but in the buildbotics controller, at the end of lines the controller slows down the machine with “s-curve” acceleration since it can’t stop instantly it has to slow before it stops. Overscan allows the machine to physically move past the part of the image while slowing down, after the laser powers off.
You can see a little bit from my machine this weekend, using horizontal fill, the engraved star and letters toward the top burn deeper/darker than the ones at the bottom where the machine is able to get up to the programmed speed. (10k mm/m). On the narrower passes it doesn’t move as quickly so it burns more. This is especially noticeable if using an “offset fill” in lightburn with the buildbotics controller. It’s necessary to do a materials test for small fills as well as for large fills to get the best results…
edit: i looked it up, and vectric also has the setting for “overscan”
“Overscan allows the user to have the laser pass beyond the edge of the lasered area, to account for deceleration of the machine which would otherwise result in a darker edge to the laser burn. Overscan is machine dependant and the user will need to run some test images to identify how much overscan to use on their machine at a given feedrate to eliminate overburn at the edges of the lasered area.”
