Engraving a Polycarbonate/Thermoplastic polyurethane phone case

I heard through the grapevine that the GF can engrave phones and laptops (haven’t looked into it more, not doing that anyway), so I thought maybe I would be able to engrave my phone case. It’s a LG G8 ThinQ Case Slim Armor made by Spigen, and made of Polycarbonate and Thermoplastic polyurethane, per the website.

Will I die/catch on fire/ruin my GF if I attempt to engrave this? If not, any suggestions for the settings I should use?

What I’ve seen of burning polycarbonate is that it turns yellow/brown and makes really dirty smoke, so the engraving looks bad and the smoke could damage optics… basically, not a great idea.

The phones and laptops there are Proofgrade settings for are anodized metal cases (MacBook, Microsoft Surface, older iPhones), so the Glowforge is just removing a colored coating from a metal. They’re not for use on plastic cases.

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Yeah, polycarbonate doesn’t burn pretty - but something done entirely of vector lines burned fast/low power might still look good. The :glowforge: does a great job on leather and anodized metals - so if you get a case out of one of those…

Glad I asked, @dan84 thank you for saving me from myself :joy:

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Thank you, @deirdrebeth, I’ll check out some new cases and see if I can come up with something that will work.

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