I not an expert at engraving or the program you’re using, but my understanding is that engrave functions attempt to cut the full width between the two bounding contours by adjusting the depth of the cut.
In your case, the curves appear to change line weight/thickness throughout; they are not perfectly straight lines and curves. My guess is the cutter is constantly moving up and down to compensate.
Haven’t used FCarve either, but @Hentsch has likely nailed the problem.
I would try cleaning up the image. @Sharpsburg_Woodworke has a description and videos showing a straightforward method to trace images here that will hopefully fix your issue.
@mrgnstrn: As a side note, I have Arrow of Light plaques on my to-do list by early March. If you do solve this issue, any chance I could trouble you to post the cleaned image ? TIA
Your original image has nonuniform line widths and some wavy lines on the upper arch and around the fletchings and arrowhead. If you just want a standard line width throughout, you might try tracing this to vector, setting the line width and then setting it to v carve and that would remove all the z movement because everything would then be the same.
Ended up having some time to work on my AOL plaques today. I used Easel to import/trace/smooth an image and then edited it to my liking. Here’s a link.
@Orob–yes, it relatively easy to get g-code from Easel. From the Machine menu item, set Machine to “Other (grbl)”, then click on the “Advanced >>” link at the bottom of the Machine menu. This will bring up a dialog box that has a button to “Generate g-code”. Once g-code is produced, a button will appear to allow you to download a file.
Also, if you want to use another g-code generator, File --> Download ZIP will give you a SVG of the design.
