Why did my design fall apart when I cut it?
A piece falls apart for one of two reasons. Either a part is joined to the body by a neck too thin to survive handling, under about 1 mm in plywood, or the part is not joined at all and the cut simply frees it. Both are in the drawing before anything is burnt, and both are visible without cutting anything.
Written by the maker who builds MakerWizardChecked against the app's own code on
What to look for
- Necks thinner than 1 mm: a tail, an ear, the top of a letter, the loop of a keychain.
- Shapes that touch but do not overlap. On screen they look joined; the cut goes between them.
- Details thinner than the beam: anything below about 0.5 mm burns away instead of being cut.
- A cut outline traced from artwork that had a shadow or a glow: the soft edge becomes a chain of slivers.
Fixing it
- Thicken the neck, or bridge the gap with a small welded rectangle.
- Weld overlapping shapes into one outline instead of leaving them stacked.
- Move the fine detail to the engrave layer, where thin is fine and nothing is cut through.
- Make the whole piece bigger. Doubling the size doubles every neck.
Checking it automatically
MakerWizard runs an erosion pass over the cut layer: it shrinks every shape by half the join width and looks at what is left. A neck that disappears under that test is a neck that snaps in the post. The check reports it in plain words, and a file with that problem is not offered for download until you have seen the message.