Can I cut and/or engrave a basic mat that goes in a frame?

Hello Fellow Creators! Does anyone know or has anyone tried to cut or engrave on a basic mat. Like the ones you get from Michaels? If so, do you have a picture? Thanks!

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What kind of “mat”?

Per the post title, believe OP is referring to a precut mat board frame.

There are lots of posts about this if you use the search function - including pictures.

Yes you can. The settings I’ve used are:
cut: speed:200 Power: 95
Engrave: speed: 1000 Power: 45

It will not cut a beveled edge like a mat cutter does in a frame shop. It will leave a decent amount of soot on the edge too which can get all over if you’re not careful. I’ve used mat board to make earring holders, tags and signage for products.

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Oh yes, mat board is thick paper. You can definitely do that on a :glowforge: :slight_smile:

https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=mat%20board%20%23beyond-the-manual

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I use a number of mat boards and art boards from a variety of sources and several different thicknesses. I have found that I need to tweak the settings for different sourced mat board, but not by a lot. As mprather says, there can be some soot at times, depending on the brand (some seem more prone than others). The board I use most is just shy of a 1/16" (0.061")/1.52mm and the settings I use are almost identical to mprather’s – but when I used the same settings on one board the settings were way too powerful… mini flames, massive charring. so if you have spare board, doing some test cuts is a good idea. On a related note, I am amazed at the detail that mat board can hold – I have used it to build HO Scale (train) models and it works remarkably well.

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