After receiving a comment by the original commissioner of this image (  sigil-prince ) regarding whether he would be getting a copy of the original work ( https://www.furaffinity.net/view/43158060/ ) and a few messages back and forth regarding an error in communication I thought that I'd made, we came to the understanding that nothing had gone wrong, but that he indeed did want a print of his own.

There's a bit of a story behind this print that I feel really brings to light how difficult this process can be. Looking back at some of my earlier posts I've made, one can find that many of the earliest prints resulted in multiple failures before the final product was achieved; this was no different.
Having run a print for a friend of mine toward the end of last year, I thought nothing of the declining quality of the print depth—an issue I assumed was coming from my caution rather than an indicator of maintenance being needed—nor of the potential clashing of firmware and software versions after a forced update put my computers software leagues ahead of the machine's firmware. That was a mistake I won't soon repeat.
Normally when a print fails, it can be salvaged in some way, either by sanding off the original image and beginning again, or by masking the failure with some sort of decoration (as with this print: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/42592062/ where there's no clear indicator that the print failed thanks to the small shelf at the bottom) but this print was different.
For what ever reason the machine ran as expected, but around the 70% mark the laser cut out and didn't resume etching until around the 97% mark, where it only operated at about half power.

Now initially I assumed this was due to a power outage—there were pretty strong storms in the area and we'd lost power as I was trying to set the machine up for the first attempt—and that the next attempt would run fine. I was wrong. Despite clear weather and steady power, the issue duplicated the following weekend, exactly.
I was stumped, but on thinking about it, I made the determination that there was a software clash and that it was causing the laser to stop functioning.
Downloading the updates, and installing them to the machine solved the problem, and this print was the result. Now, in sanding off the image on the first piece I tried to print, I absolutely butchered the piece, and had assumed that it would cause the print to fail in terms of depth consistency (which influences both detail and clarity of the image) but apparently I was—rather pleasantly—wrong.
I had to sleep while this print ran, and when I went to look at it in the morning, my jaw dropped! It had turned out so much better than I had expected, and even had some kind of program hiccup which (surprisingly) added a level of depth to the image that wasn't there in the artwork. Thanks to the thin lines of unburned wood streaking down the length of the image give it—in my opinion—the appearance of being made using a vintage photograph rather than a modern piece of art.

I approached  sigil-prince with this flaw and asked if he wanted it, given that the surface had been butchered (I did smooth it as best I could but it was as level as the Atlantic ocean in a hurricane by my standards) and that the print wasn't 100% perfect with those strange unburned lines. His response to this piece was pretty much the same as mine when I saw the newly finished print, so needless to say—since pictures never serve these pieces justice—I sincerely hope that when he gets his print, he is as pleased with it as he was with seeing the picture I'm writing this description for.

Anyway, many thanks to  sigil-prince for giving me another chance to print this fantastically detailed image by  Lachland-Nightingale I greatly enjoy the process of working on these (even if they sometimes frustrate the crap out of me) because every one is a learning experience, and every one is different!