I’m trying to both engrave and a cut two tone acrylic which is 1/16 of an inch. I can get it to cut just fine, but the engrave always leaves just a little bit of the top color in the engraved area. Does anybody have any suggestions for me to try to make it just a little bit cleaner? Thank you.
Deeper engrave by slowing the speed or increasing the power
Two passes? Or two runs?
You’ve opened a support ticket but they can’t help with non-Proofgrade materials, so I’ve moved this to an appropriate forum.
Increasing power, decreasing speed, or multiple passes will each have the same effect of deepening the engrave, you just need to test until you find settings that work.
Here’s the conditions I used for a two-toned 1/8” acrylic; they might also work for your 1/16” material. Note that this was a defocussed engrave: I manually set the focus height to 1/8” higher than the actual material height.
This is the project I used it on:
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I believe the air assist is blowing residue from the top color into the engraving. I found that blasting it with a stream of alcohol from a squirt bottle cleared it up.
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I sometimes do a second pass at lower power to clean it up
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It can be cleaned after removal from the machine or you can ignore everything else and do an additional pass with a very low power to dust the debris off.
I notice this with red (a lot).
Color will also force adjustments for initial engraving. Green and red both seem to require harder burns.
Two PSA below:
Avoid the blue marble looking two color. No idea what is used for that hue, but it actively flames and needs to be carefully watched.
Here are my first attempt values for two color acrylic (0.060 - 0.080 thick). As usual, each batch will require testing to verify the numbers.
engrave - 1000/60 @195 (for 0.060 thick)
score - 300/15
cut - 225/full (can use 100 instead of full but some colors will not cut thru - if it chars on back, just mask the back and save some clean up work)
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