Cutting & raster engraving acrylic

[Dubliner]

I have to cut & raster engrave a few samples for a client. What would the recommended S&P be on a 100w co2 in 3/16 Acrylic for cutting and for rastering a small logo/trademark in the corner? TIA Neville

[echojdlaser]

Laser engraving cutting machine is little limited. It is good at for acrylic processing, when engraving, you could try fast speed, for cutting, maybe a bit slow.

80W could cut max. 15mm, 4mm or 5mm, 60W is ok.

You could try to test freely.

Echo

[Tweakie]

This was all done with 30 watts.
It's trial and error with the vector speed as it depends on material thickness as well as ambient temperature. Pretty much trial and error with the raster logo as well.

Tweakie.

[grandpa jay]

Do you have the dxf files for the three gears shown in the picture? I would love to try them on my CNC mill.
Grandpa Jay

[Tweakie]

Do you have the dxf files for the three gears shown in the picture? I would love to try them on my CNC mill. Grandpa Jay

Sorry, I do not produce a DXF because I run GCode.
I have attached the GCode for 1 gear - see if you can do anything with it. Because these were laser cut there is no Z commands but in the code I use B0 to turn the laser off (Z plus movement) and B1 to turn it on (Z minus movement). Search and replace could change these to Z movement. The included tool radius offset is 0.05mm (laser beam radius) so you would need to adjust your offset accordingly also all my units are metric.
It's a long shot but if you can do anything with it then email me and I will send the GCode for the others.

Tweakie.

[zax15uk]

Tweakie,

That's a really cool design!

I converted it to dxf and would love to cut the set and try it if you don't mind.

What program did you use to create these gears?

Zax.

[Tweakie]

Hey Zax that's brilliant, I had not even considered the possibility of creating a DXF from the GCode. They were made using Gearotic Motion Gearotic Motion (written by Art of Mach3 fame).
Here are the other two.

Tweakie.

[Dubliner]

Hey guys - cutting is going well, but in one spot the cut went over some acrylic I was using as spacers under the sheet and the liquid acrylic seeped a littl bak onto the part, is there any way to clean that?, Its minor, but looks a little like when you used to put too much glue on the canopy of that Airfix Spitfire we all built as kids.

[cellardoor7]

tweakie, cool gear set

zax, could you post the dxfs for the entire gearset?, i dont have means to convert from gcode to dxf. may i ask what software you use to do this?

thank you both

[zax15uk]

Here are gears 2 and 3 converted as is... so remember they have the 0.05mm offset. The same as gears1.

I also attached tweakie-gears.dxf that has all 3 gears without any offset (so you can apply whatever offset you want).

These were converted with ArtCAM, but I have several programs capable of this - DesKAM will do it, so will TurboCADCAM and I think you can use plugins with Google Sketchup and achieve it too.

Zax.

[cellardoor7]

thank you zax

[Tweakie]

Originally Posted by Dubliner Hey guys - cutting is going well, but in one spot the cut went over some acrylic I was using as spacers under the sheet and the liquid acrylic seeped a littl bak onto the part, is there any way to clean that?, Its minor, but looks a little like when you used to put too much glue on the canopy of that Airfix Spitfire we all built as kids.

I think the only way is to polish it out.

(the acrylic I use has a plastic peel off covering on both sides which does not ignite like the paper stuff so I cut it with the covering on - prevents this sort of problems but it's a pain to remove all the little bits from the finished parts still it's no worse than the vinyl sign weeding).


Brilliant work with the DXF's Zax, cant wait to see the gears.

Tweakie.