Faux Leather

Anybody cut faux leather? Is it laser safe?

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Do you mean microfiber or pleather? The microfiber is supposed to be, but whenever I look for suppliers all I can find are companies that supply at an industrial scale. I’ve seen laser cut items made from this offered for sale, however, it is always possible they’re sacrificing lasers for fashion. Pleather, you’d have to check what is made from.

My understanding is that you have to be really careful cutting fake leather products. A lot of them are made with vinyls, and unless you know that the vinyl you’ve got does not contain chlorides, you can damage your machine with the by-products of combustion. :neutral_face:

not only that, be careful about leather. if you see “bonded” in the name, it’s not just leather, there are “bonding” agents in there that could be bad (and it will likely just melt as you cut it anyway).

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Most faux leather contains PVC which is bad for you and the laser to cut it or burn it. I think you can find them out of polyurethane and/or polyester. The PU produces a lot more hydrogen cyanide than other materials which can be very dangerous in some concentrations (25x more deadly than carbon monoxide). There are some others like cork which might be ok, but watch out for the backing material which may or may not be ok.

I think the upshot is that you have to decide based on a particular kind of faux leather and only with good information on what it is made out of.

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Spot on. And sometimes one of the components is a PVC based pleather.

you should see the mess when i used a branding iron on a piece of bonded leather. i told the person it was going to look bad, and omg it so did.

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