My Preferred Settings for Hardwood Engraving

 When I got my Bachin laser, I did a lot of experimenting to get my settings down.  Playing with speed and power are the two ways to dial in the color of the burn, but depending on the wood species and design of the product, speed and power can change for each burn.  

Here are the settings I use 90% of the time:

Now even though you have those, there's a couple things you have to take into account with each burn.  Sometimes, you are burning an image across multiple species of wood.  The burn will not come out even unless you lower the speed to around 40% and hit it with 100% power.  And even if you do that, it's not going to look good.  Be prepared to see the burn look different on each species.  So what speed/power combinations do you use in this situation?  Pick the species that is the lightest in color and go with that.  

I figured these numbers out a couple ways.  The first was just by plain trial and error.  I would burn something, and if it didn't come out as dark as I liked, I'd increase the power or lower the speed until I was happy.  If it was too dark, I'd speed it up and lower the power.  

Then I got smart.  I cut a small piece of each wood off and did a test run of each speed/power to see what worked best.  This picture is of the walnut piece I did it on.  I knew from experience that dark woods burned better at faster speeds, so I maxed out the speed to start and increased the power by 10% up to 100%.  70% was a little too light for me, but 80% started to leak outside the edges of the square and didn't look as sharp, so I settled on 75%.  I did this with the different species of wood I had to determine my optimal speed/power settings for each one.

Now, a die-hard laser enthusiast would look at the above and think it was tedious and the wrong way of doing it, especially when there are graphics made precisely for the purpose of finding power/speed (see below).  The image is made to find the optimal settings for a material by combining all the speed/power settings into one image.  However, this requires the machine to be able to adjust the power/speed in the middle of a burn, and I have yet to figure out how to use Engraver Master for that purpose.  If you are using a paid software program such as LightBurn, it will work just fine.  But in Engraver Master, this is the best way I have found to do it.

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