I recently got some 1/16" plywood, mentioned here:
I’ve had a chance to use it, so here’s my rough review.
The 1/16" plywood seems to be good quality, the surface is sanded nicely, and there are no loose wood fibers.
It looks like it’s birch but that’s hard to say.
Dimensions are not 12x16, they are 11.75x16.5 This suits me fine, anything over about 11.25 inches is easy to place in the performance bed.
It cuts quickly. On my pro it’s 320/full/1x, and I think I may be overpowering it. I bet I could go even faster.
It’s three plies of wood, and I see no voids.
I measured its thickness and got 0.063" - 0.065", The variation could be due to my caliper technique, so I stacked three sheets and measured the combined thickness: 0.188, which averages out to about 0.063". It seems pretty consistent.
This is hilariously thin after dealing with 0.125" materials for so long. It made me giggle in the way that cutting new materials made me laugh back when I was new to lasering.
Because it cuts so quickly, it really doesn’t char. The edges are a light blonde color, barely lasered.
I’ve wanted to go smaller and smaller on my creature projects, and really material thickness was starting to be my limiting factor. This lets me go much smaller. Now it’s starting to be “this is a pain because it’s hard to see the little pieces”.
Thanks! It’s a Varmilo keyboard with replacement shine-through caps. I actually used the laser to modify the keys and wrote it up here, there are some pictures of the keyboard and the discussion of my technique:
That’s great to hear that it works so great! Pulling it up on the Amazon link, although it only has 5 reviews, all 5 gave it a 5 ranking. That says a lot.
Do you happen to know if the 1/8” plywood from the same source is good? I’m about out of 1/8” unfinished ply and their prices are reasonable if the quality is good.
No, sorry. I get all my baltic birch from REDACTED near REDACTED and REDACTED. Their prices are good and somehow they still have B/BB in stock. I bought 30 sheets a while back, which makes for hella stockpile of baltic. I shouldn’t need any more for at least another year or 2.
Basically, I’d recommend finding a local wood supplier that has a stash and jump on it. My local supplier dried up, so I checked all the cities along the route of a road trip I was doing and found some a few hours from home. It was a little awkward trying to cut the sheets down from 5’x5’ to fit in my Subaru but I brought my cordless circular caw and rip cut with me, and made it work in a random parking lot of an abandoned church near the wood supplier.
Pro tips:
Don’t do this in June. The sun is brutal in REDACTED.
Don’t do this in the sun. See Pro tip #1.
BrIng extra batteries for your saw and some way to cool them down when they overheat because you’re just trying to cut as quickly as possible.
Most suppliers don’t offer cutting services nor will they let you cut on site. Maybe you can convince them to let you cut it, but if you find a supplier who has a panel saw and is willing to cut it down for you, it’s worth a few extra bucks. Cutting big sheets of ply without a panel saw is a bit of a task. “Buy a panel saw then!” I would except that a: they’re big and b: they’re expensive. Alas.
I was just thinking about 1/16 plywood sheet the other day and wondering where I could find some. Thanks for the link (again) and I love how it let you make things even smaller!
Thank you for testing this wood and reporting back. I just added it to my Amazon cart. I don’t really have a project for it at the moment. But somehow I need it right now.
I too have found myself going to smaller designs, and the filler of normal ply has kept me using tempered hardboard for such. Is this the path out of my wilderness?
