Veneer is a sheet of real wood from 0.6 to 1 mm, used for marquetry, wooden business cards and surface facing. Its thinness changes everything: the laser goes through almost instantly, and the difficulty is not power but holding the sheet flat.
Settings: what really matters
Divide your usual settings: 18% at 3,500 mm/min for engraving, 45% at 900 mm/min for cutting with a 20 W diode. Any excess power burns the back face and warps the sheet.
Focus must be perfect: on 0.6 mm, half a millimetre of error turns a fine engraving into a wide, blurred line.
Common thicknesses and pitfalls
Common veneers are 0.6 mm (marquetry) and 1 mm (cards, facing). Some come backed with paper: paper burns differently from wood, always run a test.
Main pitfall: the sheet flies off. The air assist flow alone is enough to lift it and ruin a cut. Use a honeycomb bed with suction, magnets on the edges, or a low-tack adhesive over the whole back face.
Risks and finishing
High fire risk: a sheet this thin ignites in a second if the beam stops. Never run veneer without standing at the machine.
For finishing, a very light spray varnish fixes the surface without drowning the engraving. Remove soot with a kneaded eraser rather than a damp cloth, which warps the sheet.
Every figure on LaserSettings comes with the machine, the laser source, the material and the thickness it was tested on. A setting published for a 10 W diode says nothing about a 40 W CO2, and a setting for 3 mm says nothing about 6 mm: check those four things before you copy any number.
Settings are confirmed or disputed by the members who reproduce them, so reliability comes from cross-checking rather than popularity. Photos of the result — cut edges, engraving shades, scorching — tell you more than a single number found on a forum.
Whatever the material, treat a published setting as a starting point: run a small power/speed test grid on an offcut, clean the lens, redo the focus, work with fume extraction and air assist, wear glasses rated for your wavelength and never leave the machine unattended.