I had another idea on how to visualize what is going on inside our cuts.  I ran my previous repeat line test again at 200 mm/min and 80% power, but this time I moved the next line over only 0.05mm between each run.  That ensures that the laser cuts are overlapping.  I then ran the test starting off the edge of a piece of 6 mm thick balsa wood and let it run until it had removed a few mm from the end.

You can see just how varied the cut is, this nicely correlates with our last test's data.  What is most interesting is that it appears the wood is more dense in certain places. Even though we ran the cuts over slightly different parts of the wood, we still get high spots in roughly the same places.

It is also interesting to note that there is a touch of overburn at the very edge of the motion (at the beginning and end of motion) but otherwise we don't really see any other issues caused by the laser head accelerating up and down at the beginning and end of motion.

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Here is a nice writeup on feeds and speeds from the Cindymill project.  I did not have any other place to put it, so here seems fine.