Howdy!
First time ever cutting acrylic (3mm smoked one) so I used the settings found on the excel for “clear” as a base on a Glowforge Pro, aka speed 125 and Full Power.
It did cut fine but I can notice on the borders that the grill “transferred” to the acrylic so I assume there was excessive heat?
Would you raise speed, lower power, both?
Thanks!
Why wouldn’t you use the Proofgrade settings for medium acrylic, which for my pro is 170/full? Your speed is much too slow, and you are getting flashback.
Since it wasn’t proof grade and never tried to cut acrylic before, I used the spreadsheet as a guide for starters.
I’ll raise speed to 170 and see how it goes. Thanks!
It doesn’t have to be proofgrade material for you to use the drop down menu and use one of the proofgrade settings. Those settings have been specially calibrated to work the best with those particular materials. I suggest you begin with those and I’ll bet you never go back to the way you’re doing it now.
You’ve got your next steps - but if you want to read more on it, those charred marks are referred to as “flashback”.
The PG settings can sometimes result in a bit of flashback on naked acrylic. The paper masking that comes on PG acrylic helps with that.
If you don’t have any masking, or don’t want to deal with peeling it, a sheet of copy paper between the crumb tray and acrylic works nicely.
Copy paper? Like regular paper? Or is it some kind of formulated paper?
Yes, you can use regular copy paper in the Glowforge. There are settings in the material section for 20# paper.
Yup regular office paper 
Thank you all for the tips
Unfortunately, you’ve found the weakness with spreadsheets of settings. You might find this interesting, check out #6:
Did you mask it?
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