Keith Colson
03-04-2015, 9:21 PM
I made a good discovery today. When I cut out 10mm Acrylic sign letters they are always hard to remove from the sheet and sharp corners quite often come out with little chips on the corners due the acrylic re-amalgamating. Here is the process I am doing now.
I run the acrylic with two passes at double the speed with an auto z height change. With this process the letters come out easily and the corner chips are totally gone. The machine time is pretty much the same.
Here is my process
1) Put the artwork on my green and red vector layers
2) Green cuts first for me so auto Z the green to 8mm (2mm focus under the surface)
3) Set the red layer for an auto Z height of 5mm
Normally I run one pass with 80% power and 1.3% speed @ 500ppi. With this process I run 80% power and 2.6% speed @ 500ppi. When you have a 1.5 hour job of letters in the bed this saves me a lot of cleanup and removal time. ( I only run 80% max power in summer here as I don't like my laser getting too hot)
Cheers
Keith
I run the acrylic with two passes at double the speed with an auto z height change. With this process the letters come out easily and the corner chips are totally gone. The machine time is pretty much the same.
Here is my process
1) Put the artwork on my green and red vector layers
2) Green cuts first for me so auto Z the green to 8mm (2mm focus under the surface)
3) Set the red layer for an auto Z height of 5mm
Normally I run one pass with 80% power and 1.3% speed @ 500ppi. With this process I run 80% power and 2.6% speed @ 500ppi. When you have a 1.5 hour job of letters in the bed this saves me a lot of cleanup and removal time. ( I only run 80% max power in summer here as I don't like my laser getting too hot)
Cheers
Keith