Anyone try Yupo Paper?

I cut some yupo paper (100% polypropylene) yesterday. I’m using what’s marketed as “Yupo Translucent” by Legion. I measured it with calipers to be .006" thickness. I got a pad of it from Blick.

I tried 3 settings and found 400 / 25 to be the best. Later in the day (with the GF hotter) I found 400 / 28 to work well.

Here are some test results:

You’ll notice 500 / 30 and 400 / 22 didn’t go quite all the way through everywhere, so there are little perforations (looks like tiny hairs) where it stuck. You do want it to be a little bit stuck so your piece doesn’t accidentally go flying. But 400 / 25 was the cleanest cut.

I held the material directly down on the crumb tray with magnets at the four corners.

I ended up expanding my design to compensate for a .008" kerf, but I didn’t measure this explicitly, just tried it out and got the fit I was looking for.

There was a tiny bit of singe (brown) on the edges, on the bottom side of the cut.

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interesting it’s called yupo translucent. it looks mostly opaque here. maybe it’s so lightly translucent that you need a gap between the surface behind and some light.

It diffuses light behind it pretty nicely.

I got the idea from Jessica Rosenkrantz’s Design Objects class (check out these sculptures!) where she had students design lamps with lasercut polypropylene and plywood. I asked Jessica where she sourced her polypropylene and she said she used this stuff, Yupo Translucent.

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so it seems mostly opaque without that backlight. but some diffuse transparency with the light.

might have to pick some up for work to test out some proposal cover concepts. trying to decide by reading the description if it would be printer-safe (i.e., not melt in the fuser). regular yupo synthetic paper is, but this polypropylene may not be.