First off, Happy New Year to all. I have a 3018 Pro with a 7 watt laser and the xcarve. Been making tree ornaments for customers and thought by adding laser engraving would be a good addition to my offerings. My problem is trying to calculate the starting point for the laser and xcarve to fully cut the ornament out of the wood blank. I’m using both machines for better production and not interested in adding a laser to the xcarve. Any ideas or suggestions I can try? Here’s an example.
what I’ve done in the past is export my easel design as SVG, bring that into lightburn, ADD a origin point (or 2 lines as a cross hair actually) right at the lightburn origin so I can align my laser to it every time, and then engrave the part outline onto a piece of wood that I’ll lay the part onto within the laser… then I can just lay my workpiece (cut on the cnc) onto the lasered out trace line and then I’ll have the part in the right place…
Then I set that shape outline to NOT cut, but i leave it in the project to assist with aligning the design as desired… 
You could take this further and machine a little pocket in a jig and place that perfectly aligned into the laser machine, but I don’t do a ton of repeat things, so the engraved alignment works for the 10 or so repeat things I make, then the next job will typically be a different shape anyway.
Thanks Seth, sounds like I may need to give it a try. The example took almost an hour just calculating the start point for the xcarve after the laser etching. I got lucky and I believe a more intricate engraving would make things more difficult.
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This sounds like a good video Seth.
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