I’ve been asked if I can do anything with Linen Micarta. From what I can find out there, I’m leaning towards no. Anyone have any insight on this? The three threads I found here did not give specific details, but going through MSDS on micarta in general seem a little scary.
My question is specific to the linen type and not the canvas or other types. Thank you!
Will be a difficult one to tell i think, it is a composite material and not sure if there is any specific recipe for it either. Might be worth contacting a supplier on the phone and ask if it contains chlorine or any other laser harmful elements materials.
First… do NOT take my word for it. Contact whoever makes your material and find out from them as @primal_healer says. But I do not see anything in micarta that would be of concern. It’s mostly epoxy, linen, and other layered stuff like fiberglass. I only found one other site that mentioned it in the same breath as a laser cutter and they said it was fine to cut and did so easily.
Only thing that would concern me really is what type of resin they used to make the material
If that’s true you’re done. Can’t cut fiberglass with the Glowforge.
odd. I saw specifically that fiberglass + co2 laser was ok. Glowforge specific no-no I take it?
That would be a huge negative! As someone who makes “Micarta” and uses several types of resins we our selves do not run it in the GF. We would use a CNC router for that process.
“Micarta” is a registered trademark brand and is commonly used as a general reference for the making of it.
The resins probably wont be a problem. Glass, though? Unless your glass fibers are super thin, there is just no way. Prove me wrong, but I doubt you’ll get through it.
There are previous threads about it… searching for fiberglass will yield some results, but this sums up my thinking:
I am only going off of what I read. Could be they were using a more powerful CO2 laser and our 40-45 watters just can’t do it.
Yes, there are different types of “micarta” and this one specifically is the linen one (there’s fiberglass, canvas, etc.) I’d have to figure out what it’s binding with but the concern of formaldehyde came up with my msds searching. @ssincity thank you, I was wondering if a cnc router would be the alternative for this material so thanks!
I’m going to ask what the binders are and report back here 
Epoxy based and linen fabric
I have some big pieces (large blocks actually) of a linen and canvas versions that I got as cutoffs from Curbell Plastics and they list the binding resin as “Phenolic” but I don’t have an MSDS for it so I couldn’t tell you how safe it would be. I have so much that I share it with one of my brothers who uses it for knife scales and it looks incredible when finished and polished! Makes nice pen blanks too.
According to Trotec epoxies and phenolic resins are considered a no.
https://www.troteclaser.com/en-us/knowledge/faqs/unsuitable-materials-laser-processing/