Corian Scoring and Engraving

@marmak3261, so glad you were able to test this out! Looks awesome! I too have to find a supplier now. In grad school I asked a local place that cut out sink holes in Corian countertops…have to see if I can grab some more of those!

Corian testing on a glowforge yaaaaaaaaaaaas!!!

You just made my day! And I love the design, too. Though now I suppose the next test would be to see if the Corian can be cut all the way through…I bet with the flip-alignment cutting through 1/4" pieces may not be too bad. Fingers crossed!

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I did a cut with 80% power and 20 in/minute. It threw up the sparks way too much for my comfort and hardly made a dent deeper than the raster. This was on .46" Corian. Maybe multiple cuts eventually. My guess is not efficiently will try a few approaches though. The Sawmill Creek folks discuss cutting 1/4 Corian with an 80 watt or higher laser. You can use a regular table saw to cut smaller shapes and a hole saw to do circles like for round coasters.

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What a great video to include as well! He sure does make some great DIY videos!

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Aw, bummer! Thanks a bunch for the info though! The sparking was my biggest worry…the Corian I was able to cut through was on a 60 watt with a pretty strong exhaust system, so I always thought there was the possibly that it wouldn’t be possible with the glowforge. Perhaps a desktop CNC router is in my future…haha

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Yeah, Corian is supposed to cut pretty good on a CNC router. I bought a piece recently to experiment with on my router but then got tied up in too many other projects.

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It cuts like a dream on routers!! Although the sound isn’t terribly fun to listen to lol. The first time I ever used Corian was when a fabrications course I took in school introduced us to the big Onsrud router we had in the shop…that was such a cool project.

Edit: Oh hey, random thought…think a Dremel would be able to handle Corian?

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Ok, that just went to the top of my build list. Would be great for my sons’ school video projects. Thanks for sharing!

I think the epoxy in Corian is known for scorching under heat. so maybe without any fancy engraved designs to be ruined.

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Thinking about embossing, stamping, relief engraving and the variations of depth of engrave and height of relief.

Then thinking of what it would look like in a press on leather.

Just thinking.



2" square tile of white Corian, .46" thick. The depth of the engrave is from .75 to .9 mm. The height of the relief is .75 to .85 mm.

50% power, 200 in/min. 675 lpi. 32 minutes process.

Was surprised that the engrave got so off center to the material. Interesting. I thought I had taken care of positioning. Perhaps not. Perhaps with all engrave and smaller job the differences add up.

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Oooooh so cool!!! Thanks for sharing! That’s a pretty deep engrave, too! Love love love the reverse engraved one. Are those Corian pieces the size of the free sample pieces you can get off DuPont’s website?

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I edited the post. I saved the post too fast before I was done so it has a few more details of the specs.

This has amazing potential.

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Haha I replied too fast! Just saw your additional details. Thanks again for sharing- so excited to work with this material.

I love what it does – can’t wait to be able to do this!!

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Wow, gorgeous! I’m thinking if you built a little tolerance between the positive and the negative, you’d have a very nice two-part embossing die.

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Oh, I will do another relief and see how it fits. That is a cool test! But I’ll have to do both the relief and the engrave again, this time sized in Inkscape. Since I imported a higher res bitmap I resized the images and they aren’t the same size. Continuing to think through this workflow.

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that is a downside to resizing at the end of the workflow, as opposed to doing it in the initial design. When you go back to make duplicates, you have to remember how much over/under-sized it was.

My plotter software has a “fit to material” re-sizing option, which is great to get the most out of material, but a very poor idea if you are going to need to repeat the job later down the road. The option is a toggle that stays set when you close the software, so if you do use it, you have to be careful to turn it back off or risk forgetting that it was set and getting a totally out of scale cut first thing the next morning.

I have, on occasion, gone back to the design software and resized the art to the appropriate scale; it does tell you how much it scaled up or down to fit material.

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Celtic design for the win!

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WHOA! You taught us something on that one, @marmak3261. I’ve never seen an engraving like that before on Corian. It’s incredible.

We’re starting a major block of software work that will, in time, result in dramatically better lid camera alignment work.

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