Good Day Community!!

I'm hoping to get some good intel on how the community does some “cleanup” work on projects. 

I'm currently working on an Incise project that requires a very flat/clean surface as these are being utilized as a kind of stamp so I need to be able to scrape the material to remove access paint. I'm half way there…with the following issue.

As far as the Incise process goes, I've got that pretty dialed in, depth is where I need it, and designs are clean. What I'm encountering is that the edges of the surface surrounding the Incise seem to get a very small ridge around them, which I'm assuming is the superheated debris landing and cooling during the “carve” process. This is causing the paint to smear on the material surface prior to x-fer of paint. Ideally, I could scrape the surface, leaving paint only in the “carve” and x-fer the design to my applicable material(s). 

 My immediate thought was to do a scoring pass at a .03 offset (size of the laser beam) to clear the debris. This seems to kind of be working, but need to play with power/speed to dial this in and honestly am worried that I'll just be basically moving the ridge out further using this process.

I'm hoping to get input from the community so see if this is the right track, or if there is a more efficient way to accomplish this before I utilize a bunch of material to test that theory. 

I know one of the first things I'm going to likely get is air-assist, however I'm looking to do batch processing via the conveyer, so air-assist won't be an easy “win” due to varying positions of the material as they pass through the conveyer. 

Could this fix be as simple as a power/layer ratio? Less power/ more layers for example.

Appreciate any input! Thanks!!

Things to note:

Using XCS 2.5 for processing

Vector based files (so I can do multiple processes in a single button press)

I am using SafetyPro exhaust so there is at least a “bit” of air pulling debris out of the machine