ABS plastic

[doug king]

Okay so I know that PVC is a no no but what about ABS plastic?

[Steve C Wallace]

I would say yes but has a funny melting point. Not something I want to do a lot of.

[doug king]

I would say yes but has a funny melting point. Not something I want to do a lot of.

Good, I have some bike parts that I want to try to cut out the plastics but I don't want to hurt my laser...

I have been reading the differences in PVC vs ABS and I thought I was okay....

[Joe Pelonio]

I have a few regular jobs cutting a lot of it. No problem for the laser, but to get clean cuts it helps to apply transfer tape and wet it with water before cutting. Most of what I cut is 1/16" and some 1/8", I have tried 1/4" but it's a pain and requires 2 passes at lower power or the edges will be messy.

[doug king]

Thanks for the responses, I have a pretty contained market and I think that I can do what needs to be done, it won't be on a flat surface but a rounded piece... I have some pieces that were in crashes and scratched up coming so that I can practice on scrap before I "Bust a Move" on the real deal...

DOug

[Gary Hair]

Doug,
You can engrave and cut abs, I have done a fair amount of it. It stinks worse than acrylic but that's subjective. You won't get much of a mark engraving it unless you are working on a smooth surface, even then it's not so great for marking. I tested some a while back for a pretty large job and ended up using my cnc router to engrave the lettering that they wanted. Maybe someone has a good tip for engraving, I'd sure like to see if someone else had better results than I did. Cutting it was no problem.

Gary

[doug king]

Doug,
You can engrave and cut abs, I have done a fair amount of it. It stinks worse than acrylic but that's subjective. You won't get much of a mark engraving it unless you are working on a smooth surface, even then it's not so great for marking. I tested some a while back for a pretty large job and ended up using my cnc router to engrave the lettering that they wanted. Maybe someone has a good tip for engraving, I'd sure like to see if someone else had better results than I did. Cutting it was no problem.

Gary

The plan includes cutting and no so much engraving... We will be putting lights behind the cut out pieces to illuminate the shapes..

[Michael Hunter]

I've cut ABS boxes - the sort of thing that electronics projects get built into - and they cut pretty well, though tape protection to avoid overheating the edges is a good idea.

ABS is untrustworthy from the point of view of engraving. I have found that there is nearly always some "grain" in the plastic which shows up in the engraving. (I think that the "grain" is actually the result of the plastic flowing through the mould).

I showed one of my sample boxes to a guy who was really interested, as he had just got hold of 1000 calculators cheap - with someone else's logo on them. He asked me to try to engrave off the logos. The logo came off but the grain was so bad it looked like a ploughed field afterwards. He let me keep the one I had tried but it was so horrible that I threw it away.