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Trey Tull
03-28-2018, 9:11 AM
I'm out of the office at the moment and have some time to ponder the great mysteries of the world. I have a regular job that requires marking some small parts and my fixtures (11"x19") will hold 192 parts each. I'm wondering if I switch them to a landscape orientation (19"x11), will the job run faster The current run time is just over 32mins.

I'm going to test it when I get back to the office but in the meantime, I thought I would throw it out here to see if anyone else has played with orientation.

Thanks
Trey

Glen Monaghan
03-28-2018, 9:47 AM
It can help and it can hurt production time, just depends on the geometries. With portrait orientation, there are more direction reversals that are relatively slow, so you speed things up with landscape orientation by reducing the number of reversals. However, with landscape orientation, you have more blank space on each scan, which is wasted time. Depending on the amount of blank space and its ratio to engraved part of each scan, the extra blank space can actually slow the job down despite having fewer reversals. The Universal makes it easy to check this using the run time estimator. I just had two acrylics to engrave and had to position them in landscape to fit, but the estimator showed that it would be faster to run them separately the way I had them positioned on the bed rather than together.

Trey Tull
03-28-2018, 10:06 AM
Thanks Glen. I use the estimator a good bit for quoting jobs and that's how I plan on testing it when I get back in the office.

Kev Williams
03-28-2018, 11:53 AM
+1 what Glen said :)

I don't have a time estimator, but I will do test runs before large jobs to optimize the time... and my quote ;)

Gary Hair
03-28-2018, 12:57 PM
It depends completely on what you are engraving and the resolution. If your machine is fairly fast then it probably doesn't take much more time to traverse 19" than it does 11", so the time to engrave will be more dependent on the vertical height and dpi - eg. 1,000dpi means it has to go back and forth 1,000 times for every vertical inch. If you engraved a 11" x 19" solid rectangle then it would be much faster if you had it 19" wide than 19" tall. If you have a bunch of lines of text then it may engrave faster at 19" tall than 19" wide, it just depends on how tall the text is and how many lines.

Kev Williams
03-28-2018, 1:20 PM
On most machines, for sure all of mine, the top row would go much faster horizontally as shown,
but row two would be faster stacked vertically...
382531
-sweeping all that white space between the squares, the wasted time accumulates..

Gary Hair
03-28-2018, 2:58 PM
On most machines, for sure all of mine, the top row would go much faster horizontally as shown,
but row two would be faster stacked vertically...
382531
-sweeping all that white space between the squares, the wasted time accumulates..

Let's say the bottom squares are .5" and the top are 1". At 1,000 dpi it would take 500 passes to run the bottom row horizontally and 5,000 passes to run it vertically. I can't come up with any speed setting that would make it faster vertically. The top row would be similar - 1" would take 1,000 passes horizontally and 10,000 to run vertically. Even at low resolution it would still be the same, 5 to 1 for the small squares and 10 to 1 for the larger ones.

Kev Williams
03-28-2018, 6:32 PM
Your right, that's not the best example, since the gantry can't reach full speed on such short sections. Just did a test and the horiz outran the vert by a ton at full speed! (oops)-- My brain tends to think towards all the Cermark I do. So what I just did was ran two 2" x .1" rectangles 2" apart horiz, and then two 1/2" apart vert and ran at 20% speed... -- the horizontal run took 25 seconds, the vertical 24 seconds.

So I'm proof you should test, not guess! :D

Gary Hair
03-28-2018, 9:51 PM
A better example would be if you only had 3 of the smaller squares, one on each far end and one in the middle. That would take quite a bit longer horizontal than vertical, even with a blazing fast machine like my Trotec.

Glen Monaghan
03-28-2018, 10:05 PM
... With portrait orientation, there are more direction reversals that are relatively slow, so you speed things up with landscape orientation by reducing the number of reversals. However, with landscape orientation, you [may] have more blank space on each scan, which is wasted time. Depending on the amount of blank space and its ratio to engraved part of each scan, the extra blank space can actually slow the job down despite having fewer reversals.

The simple example of landscape being slower is having a small object on the left and another on the right side of the bed with white space in the middle. Even though there could be significantly fewer scans than with portrait mode, traversing all that white space would typically more than offset that time savings and take longer than when engraved in portrait.