Cutting board engraving with Tarkin

Reminder- set Min Power to zero on Tarkin/Pearl. It’d need to be a really special case to get into that on this type of laser.

It’s there for the DC-excited glass tubes. They’ve got odd nonlinearities the user often needs to tinker with to get to work.

The difficult/confusing thing is that when we put something into the Materials Lib, Fill is saved separately, but the parameters for for the etch line in Fill+Line is stored for the “Line” too, which usually means “cutting line”.

Thus, for a named material in the library (“3mm Baltic Birch”), the Line would be assumed to be values for cutting. We can create settings for the Fill for that entry that “looks good”. But if we try to set up Fill+Line with a line at like 10th the power to engrave finish the fill, then that will replace what was initially created for Line. Then pulling out 3mm Baltic Birch->Line mode gives you an engraving line power not a cutout line power.

That took me awhile to figure out, and it makes it problematic to create Fill settings in the library- I think we’d have to add “Fill” to the setting’s name to separate them from the normal cutting settings.

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Wanted to follow up with this topic and ask a question. Has anyone used the cutting boards filled with epoxy, and if so, how well does the epoxy stand up to the knife? I’d like to try a larger epoxy fill, but worried after time the epoxy won’t hold up.

I feel like I’ve encountered a few stories of late that epoxy is fine for small detail, or for pieces you might only expect to serve with, but less than ideal for a cutting surface. But I can’t remember the source. I think it had to do with self-healing of wood fibers