It’s a very good practice to have everyone save their material settings into the Lightburn library at the bottom (if they are absent) or to use the material settings that are in the library (if they are present).
For each material, establish a consensus cutting setting, sharpest-line engraving setting, and fast-dark rastering setting.
- Less having to think, but also
- Invitation (via the different line techniques) about how to safely graduate to intermediate, and more importantly
- greatly simplifying the option space for novices; and most importantly
- as a vital maintenance or mal-setting indicator.
If you tell brand-new users to buy eg. the 6mm baltic birch from Austin Fine Lumber and use the exact settings from the library; and in class demonstrate what a crisp cut line looks like in exactly that wood, then they will know that something is wrong if they are not seeing crisp cuts in that wood using those settings. Otherwise they’re at sea in a 10-dimensional parameter space.
Lastly, if cutting at 25%speed/100% power has been giving no-brainer crisp cuts for the past year but maybe a tube is fading or a something is mis-framissed, absent a good common library people will simply start cutting at 20% speed and figure that’s the way it should be. Any falloff from standard settings is a vital early indicator for preventative maintenance/tuning.
Anyway, Tarkin seems to have a decent starting point of settings; Dorian had only one cutting setting saved and it was nowhere close to what was effective. The table in the manual is a reasonable jumping off point but has very few size points and did not eg mention setting both the max and min power. I’d consider burying that page of the manual and instructing users to only use the library settings. You can load and save different settings libraries to allow personal collections or advanced materials/techniques.
Last point in favor: telling novices “if it’s not in the library, check with someone for good settings and then add them” adds an extra line of defense against polystyrene in the laser cutter.