Help! I just cut a number of animal shilouettes from some decidedly non-proofgrade acrylic and cannot get the $&@! paper off of it. It reminds me of kraft paper – not your everyday frisking/masking.
Gorilla Tape? Couldn’t even pull it up from the edge… 
Even with a fresh razor blade, I can’t remove but a tiny bit at a time.
Suggestions?
Let it soak in soapy water. The soap will help it wet through and release.
After seeing it melt through Plasti Dip the first thing that springs to mind is WD-40.
Then I wondered if WD-foady was “safe” to use on acrylic. Google pointed me here and they seem to think it’s OK…
Heat gun loosened about half. Hot soapy water did the rest.
WD-40 was the next step… Or perhaps just veg oil.
Thanks, all!
I was just going to come back after reading some from @hansepe’s link to say the heat gun method sounded good.
What will be your first go-to method next time? The soapy water thing sounds pretty cheap and easy, as long at it works.
My take is that it’s going to vary. A quick hit from a heat gun is (for me) easier and quicker than HSW.
Success…
These are so cute! I got some ideas here. Have been working on a design but haven’t wanted to devote time to a two hour engrave.
I had some old 1/2" acrylic that was just beastly getting the masking off. Now that I have a heat gun I’ll try that, but when I did it by scraping, the residue just wouldn’t budge. GooGone helped but I finally gave up on it.
Forgot to mention that these were products of the app’s trace feature. Sometimes it’s just faster and easier to print out a dead-tree version and scan it on the bed!
What was it? I’ve never had that kind of issue with cast acrylic. Although I do tend to buy it frequently so it’s always more or less “fresh”.
Some scrap I picked up a couple of weeks ago at Colorado Plastics. They had a pallet piled up with you-name-it for $1.74 per pound.
We have dove very old acrylic laying around and sometimes you just can’t get the paper off:-(. It becomes one with the plastic! Heat gun works good if the adhesive isn’t completely dry. I have had hit and miss results for solvents.
One trick on sheets is if you can get a corner started wrap it around a dowel tight then roll the dowel across the piece wrapping the paper up with it.
I’ll try the dowel trick next time. Reminds me of the paper towel trick for pulling the silver skin off a rack of ribs.
I have had some 1/4" acrylic in the garage for the past 10+ years and because of the desert heat, some of the paper masking is baked on while the other half has dried up and released itself completely cleanly.
The soapy water soak works “OK”, it’s not fast or efficient nor even easy but it IS certainly safe for the material and easier than peeling little ripping paper slivers bit by bit.
All I can picture is trying to get a plate of ribs away from a large Male gorilla (with a paper towel?) 
Stupid spellchecker… Silver skin, not Silverback. 
I have some acrylic with plastic film on it, probably polyethylene. Does anybody know what happens when that is lasered. Does it melt and fuse with the acrylic or does it stay removable.
I would expect it to remain removable.
The molecule is a hydrocarbon, straight chain, so the breakdown products will be co2, possibly gaseous hydrocarbons, and water, probably, so it will only ‘lock’ to the surface mechanically, if at all._
Should be fine, except possibly for scoring operations. It can get sorta stuck in the scores and it’s harder to remove.
