PG Maple thinness test

As a quick aside, I decided to do a test to see how PG thin maple holds up to mildly excessive cutting. I took one of Monica’s more complex patterns, and resized it to about 5.5 inches per side (originally a bit over 7 inches).

Once cut, the remaining wood lines are 1.1mm thick (3/64ths inch), and so far it’s proving to be pretty durable. The laser didn’t make it quite all the way through in a few spots, so there are two locations on the back where the piece suffered “tear out” — a plane of weakness in the wood, combined with an incomplete cut, resulted in some of the wood tearing off, almost breaking through the piece.

…which, actually, I consider to be a mildly impressive achievement for wood. With due care (up the power a bit over the PG defaults to guarantee full cutting), I think you could go below 1mm in the maple and still have it hold together.

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Looks great! (And I’ve gotten down to 0.75 mm on acrylic. Wouldn’t want to sit on it, but it holds up to normal wear and tear.) :grinning:

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Wow!

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How long did that take to cut, please ?
Very, very impressed.
:upside_down_face:

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Makes for a very stunning piece!

It took 22 minutes to cut, which was frankly faster than I’d feared!

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Did you happen to see this?

I cut it for the same reason, also on the PG maple, and the inner lines are just a hair under 1mm. I thought about using some scraps to try simple test cuts that were even thinner, but that’s as far as I got (thinking about it!)

Was that a vector file or a raster one ?
I’m not familliar with your reference to ‘Monica’s patterns’
:upside_down_face:

Vector; see her “cutting files” on her site:

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Thanks Martin - an amazing source that I would be happy to donate to.
John

(Donate in the sense of paying for !)
:upside_down_face:

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