The Definitive Guide is Not Very Helpful

Snapmaker 2.0 Getting Started
1

I am new to the Snapmaker and all of its uses in general. I have been learning all I can. I am doing some cutting and engraving material experiments with the laser of my A350 and I am finding that the “Definitive Guide to Laser Engraving and Cutting”

This gives frustrating advice and parameters. For example, in the suggestion for cutting colored cardstock the settings for my 1.6mW laser in the guide are:
Thickness: .3
Mode: Vector
Power: 40%
Jog Speed: 1500
Work Speed: 600
Multipass: 1
Pass Depth: 0

From my experiments, that gets you an engraved line at best. I did a fairly complex lacy cutout of a line drawing in both purple and yellow cardstock and my settings ended up being:
Thickness: 0
Mode: Vector
Power: 70%
Jog Speed 3000
Work Speed 500
Multipass: off

The cut came out beautifully! I understand that you have to do materials tests on your own specific items but, it seems to me that the “definitive guide” is anything but. All it did was confuse a newbie and make me wonder what I was doing so wrong.

Right now I’m doing an engraving test on the 1.5mm plywood that came with the Snapmaker… the Definitive Guide says to engrave it at 100% power… holy cow, it was shooting burned sparks! I turned the power down to 65% and it looks almost exactly the same, without burning the wood up. This guide seems to be giving terrible advice? Or am I not understanding something?

~G

2

Yeah, it’s not very definitive. And it’s wrong in quite a few places. (Has it changed? I didn’t remember it being so bad)
Any time you’re cutting you should be using 100%.
But you definitely don’t need to be at 100% for engraving on plywood. Around 30% with a work speed of 1000 is usually a good place to start testing.

Some of the problem is materials react so differently and some of it is that it’s subjective. One projects burned to a crisp is another one’s perfect.

-S

3

Yeah the cutting settings on the “definitive guide” do not even sort of cut the plywood at 1.5mm… frustrating! I finally set it for a cut speed of 140mm/s and 2 passes at .75mm depth, that got a pretty good result, not so charred and actually cut through.

4

More passes at higher speeds cuts with less char.

-S