It’s me again, after few experiences with acrylic, I’ve noticed that when I round the corners, the acrylic doesn’t tend to “glue” and saves you some time having to “force it out”.
So, basically, when you create your design, go to the very sharp corner, select the vertex and apply a round corner very tiny just so the laser passed there smoothly and not as a corner having to “sharp turn”.
This will not change the design, just changes the way the laser will pass through that specific part of it. (as per image).
Live Corners looks like an amazing feature! Sadly, my CS3 version doesn’t have it, so I’ve been adding two new nodes and rounding the end point. Tedious.
I believe it was FSL that I saw was working on their laser’s software to eliminate corners altogether to avoid the ‘hot spots’ that happen when the laser stops to change direction in corners. Their solution was to add a tiny ‘loop’ to the line so there’s not a hard stop. Would still result in a 90º (or whatever) corner, but the actual movement of the laser head was a smooth non-stop path. Hard to explain in text form.
Just remember that you’ll need to expand the appearance for it to actually change the path. Illustrator does a lot of things through appearances (dashed lines, mitered corners, etc) , which works fine for print but doesn’t actually alter the path, and lasers follow the path.
