Trouble cutting acrylic

[Daniel Eaton]

I'm fairly new to CNC. Most of the stuff I've been doing over the last month is etching on cermark or engraving on powder coated YETIs and alternative brands. But I wanted to do a unique Christmas present by etching a 12" disk of 1/4" cast acrylic and then cutting it into a jigsaw puzzle. I'm using a Trotec 300 Speedy for this. The etching went well. But when I tried to do the cut using a red pattern sent from Corel Draw, all I got was more etching - even at 100% power. I was using the default material settings in the material database for 1/4" cast acrylic, and even slowed it down a bit. But nothing worked. I'm running out of time before Christmas and am curious what I might be doing wrong. I think it is a 60w laser (might be 80w). What do you recommend that I set the cutting parameters to? And what size cutting lines should I be using? Any suggestions or pointers would be *greatly* appreciated.

[Jerome Klutts]

Sounds like you need to set your line width to hairline

[Daniel Eaton]

Thx. I'll give that a try.

[Mike Null]

Hairline and rgb red. See if your material settings are set to do what you want.

[Daniel Eaton]

I checked the rgb. I'm at 255,0,0. What speed should I be using?

[Bill George]

I checked the rgb. I'm at 255,0,0. What speed should I be using?

Line width at Hairline? Speed for vector cutting can vary and as to what power setting. On my ULS it was about 3 mm Sec on speed and power at 100% Yours might vary a lot for acrylic from mine.

[Tony Lenkic]

With my 60W cutting 1/4" cast acrylic settings are power-100 and speed-0.50 one pass.

[Steve Morris]

deffo line width not set to hairline if its engraving and not cutting, assuming red is set to cut in the material database