Engraving Hash Marks??

[daniel coyle]

I have novice skills with my machine and mostly focus on straightforward work. I was asked to engrave the logo for the Portland Trailblazers onto a bartop and I downloaded a black and white jpg of the logo and converted it to an svg. Here is the jpg 342913

I have a sinjoe 150watt laser with an Awc708c Plus controller. The image loaded up just fine and I set it to engrave and it looked like that is what it was doing when I did a test run with the laser off. When I tested with the laser on the machine was rastering but instead of tight, contiguous engraving I was getting 2-3 mm separation between each rastering movement so that the logo would end up looking like a series of dash marks. I have never seen this before, anyone know what could be going on?

[John Noell]

A picture might help. The first thing that comes to mind is the "interval" or "scan gap." That determines how far the gantry moves on the Y axis with each pass. Kinda sounds like yours is set to a very large value. (0.1mm is pretty close to 300 DPI as I recall and what I most commonly use.)

[Dave Sheldrake]

From memory there is a setting to produce dashed lines on the 708C, Im not near one of mine or I would check for you but have a dig round in the software

[Kev Williams]

so which of these most resembles what you're seeing?

342914

If the one on the right, could be a simple gap setting error...

if the one on the left, could be one of your programs is creating a dashed output...

[Klaus Madsen]

Of topic but are we not allowed to upload files like AI files?

[Kev Williams]

at the bottom right of this reply box is the 'go advanced' button, click that, then under the 'manage attachment' button is the list of allowed files- I don't see AI on the list...

[daniel coyle]

More like the one on the right. 342929

[Kev Williams]

That looks like a simple gap/scan interval setting-- just guessing, it looks to be maybe .5mm when normal would be .05--

FWIW, my software does NOT like entering .05 as '.05', wants a ZERO before the decimal first! I must enter '0.05' or will ignore the decimal point entirely, leaving me a 5mm gap instead!

[daniel coyle]

Ok. I do not recall playing around with the settings but I did loan use to a friend. Do you know where the setting control is? The dashed line effect is progressive. The larger I scale the design on the machine the more space there is between dashes. I am trying to attach pics here but it isn't working. Basically, when the design is scaled down enough it is engraved fully without the appearances of dashes. As I scale it up more and more it is composed of dashes that are spaced further and further apart respectively. A moderate size model has 1mm space and a large model might have 2, for example.

[Joseph Shawa]

What software is that?

[Keith Downing]

I have novice skills with my machine and mostly focus on straightforward work. I was asked to engrave the logo for the Portland Trailblazers onto a bartop and I downloaded a black and white jpg of the logo and converted it to an svg. Here is the jpg 342913

I have a sinjoe 150watt laser with an Awc708c Plus controller. The image loaded up just fine and I set it to engrave and it looked like that is what it was doing when I did a test run with the laser off. When I tested with the laser on the machine was rastering but instead of tight, contiguous engraving I was getting 2-3 mm separation between each rastering movement so that the logo would end up looking like a series of dash marks. I have never seen this before, anyone know what could be going on?

Not sure if it has anything to do with your issues here, but that is a really low quality jpeg to be using for a large engraving. It's already got some rough edges at less than 300 pixels height.

I usually engrave wood at 300-600 pixels per inch. So that means the graphic you are starting with is originally sized at less than 1 inch. If you're good with a graphics package you might be able to enlarge it and clean up the results. But if you're just blowing it up in the laser software, you're probably getting a pretty bad image to start with.

Just my $.02. Sorry if you're already handled this aspect of it, but you did say you were a novice!

[daniel coyle]

What software is that? LaserCAD V7.66

[daniel coyle]

Well, that could be it. I used a conversion program to put it into the correct file type .svg from a .jpg. Its always worked out but I can definitely try again. no offense taken at all.
Not sure if it has anything to do with your issues here, but that is a really low quality jpeg to be using for a large engraving. It's already got some rough edges at less than 300 pixels height.

I usually engrave wood at 300-600 pixels per inch. So that means the graphic you are starting with is originally sized at less than 1 inch. If you're good with a graphics package you might be able to enlarge it and clean up the results. But if you're just blowing it up in the laser software, you're probably getting a pretty bad image to start with.

Just my $.02. Sorry if you're already handled this aspect of it, but you did say you were a novice!

[Keith Downing]

Well, that could be it. I used a conversion program to put it into the correct file type .svg from a .jpg. Its always worked out but I can definitely try again. no offense taken at all.

Try converting this larger image.344900

Edit: Click on it, then right click to save. Otherwise you're still getting a small version the forum software has created as a thumbnail.

[daniel coyle]

Thanks Keith, I had to take a break from this project but am back on it now. I think that is what the problem was. I was massively scaling up, enlarging, a low quality jpeg. At small scaling it came out fine but I saw that as I scaled it up more and more hash marks became apparent and then the space between the hashes got bigger and bigger. Will let you know how this works.

[daniel coyle]

Keith, I used the image you sent and it worked pretty well. I tried to scale up its size a bit and started getting the hash mark effect again. The hashes separated by more space the bigger I scaled. So, can you tell me how you, first of all, made the image bigger in the first place (or did you find it somewhere?) and, second of all, is there something I can do with my machine settings to address the hashmarks when I can't find or create a large image with enough definition?

[daniel coyle]

From memory there is a setting to produce dashed lines on the 708C, Im not near one of mine or I would check for you but have a dig round in the software
Dave, I am still struggling with getting dashed lines on my engravings (you can see a pic of it in this thread). I tried to find the setting you were alluding to but could not. Can you point me in the right direction?