Is there anyway to untape finished prints faster?

I currently use the widest gorilla tape on amazon and it’s the single longest part of my business. I was just hoping there was a way to speed things up.

I use the same!

I like the plastic scraper blades myself.
But it kinda depends on what the project is - mind elaborating?

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I have these really complicated and dense designs that are really hard to untape when printed. Here’s an example

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Is that acrylic? Have you tried peeling all the masking before engraving?
(I generally leave my acrylic unmasked)

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I use gorilla tape, the plastic scraper and a piece of masking I have peeled off. If you roll the used masking across the unmasked area, it will work like gorilla tape - and sometimes better.

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Doesn’t taking of the tape leave burn marks? Oh and I forgot to mention that the image shown is a scored design, but my other projects use thick walnut plywood with engraved designs rather than scored.

I agree with @ekla that acrylic engraves should be done without masking. The masking turns into a gooey mess.

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Does it leave burn marks or anything potentially harmful?

Nothing harmful. You have to clean it up, but the engrave looks good. Take a small sample and do an engrave and see what you think. Many people defocus their acrylic engraves slightly. There are lots of posts and examples if you search the forum.

Here is a good place to start: Guide to Defocused Acrylic Engraving - #8 by polarbrainfreeze

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What do you mean by clean up?

Generally no burn marks on acrylic except maybe some flashback on the underside from cuts - you can use a piece of plain copier paper to mitigate that instead of masking. Test!

Will the same work for the wood I mentioned, or is that just for acrylic?

Testing is essential to knowing what your laser can and cannot do. For acrylic, if it’s a one sided design, I’d say leave the tape on the side facing the bed, less of a fire risk than sacrificial paper or cardboard as a medium between the honeycomb and material. I use a tooth brush to get the acrylic dust off of my projects, but if you’re doing a lot, I’d suggest a bigger brush to save time. I do this with projects whether they had masking on them or not, but especially for acrylic.

As for wood projects, you can leave them unmasked, but there will be build up. I got around it by cleaning the projects with baby wipes. As anything, these are all things we in the community have done throughout our ownership, so what may work for us, may not work for someone else; it’s certainly a good starting off point, though :+1:t3:.

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If it’s raw wood no but you might be able to lightly sand off the smoke marks. If it’s prefinished wood - you might be able to wipe off the smoke stains. Test!

PS> for your example image on wood - dark walnut probably won’t show much in the way of smoke stains but if it did the engrave areas will very likely not. For the flat unengraved areas around the figure you could create vector line to score the masking, peel just the interior part which will be engraved and then continue on to the engrave portion of the job. Keep all the steps in the same file/job and as long as you don’t move the piece you can safely ignore the lid image, everything will stay aligned.

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Hello @alan_karpuch, this is a great question! It looks like you received some great answers and suggestions to try when unmasking your prints. For now, I’m going to close this thread - if you have any further questions, go ahead and post a new topic. Thanks for asking!