Thinning out the PG Acrylic

So I just received my Glow Forge and have been messing around with it. I absolutley love the machine! I do have a question though. The PG Acrylic that came with the machine is about .25 inch thick. I am trying to make a design that will fit into an LED puck, but the opening is only .125 inches. How can I get just the bottom of the design to .125 so that it can slide into the puck? Hope I made sense.

Sanding or grinding would be your options.

You are likely the first person to receive “thick” acrylic vs the usual “medium”, which is 1/8" (0.125")…

The gf store is also out of stock on 12x20 medium acrylic

You can always etch it down in the areas you need! Might take a long time & few passes to etch away 1/8" thickness, but it’s possible.

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Between grinding and polishing, it seems like a lot of effort that will yield low quality results.

I just visited Tap Plastics. They have thick (1/4th"), medium (1/8th"), and thin (1/16th") acrylic – as well as lots of other sizes. I haven’t tried the thin acrylic yet, but it’s sitting in my to-test pile.

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It doesn’t add too much time to engrave a rebate on the the edge of acrylic so it will fall into a groove.

While it’s better to just source some 1/8" acrylic, the thicker stuff would take a few passes but you can get there. Depends on how important getting it flush or recessed would be. I have some LED nightlights that require engraving down to a thickness to fit into the slot for the acrylic.

Do some tests to see how deep you go per pass. Here is a file to let you know what I am talking about.

engravedepthtest

The coupon is a 1/2" engrave on a 1 x 1/2" rectangle. If you do two of them you can test how deep they go by putting them together. If you have a calipers, then just do one and measure.

The circle is a cut outline and then an engrave circle that would be the rebate for going into the slots.

In general we don’t talk settings in P&S but if you use the HD engrave on Proofgrade, that is ok since it is all standard. Do two passes with that and see what you get.

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Be sure it’s all cast, and not extruded! I’ve only seen 1/16th extruded so far, but fabulous if they have it in a cast version!!

Thank you everyone for your input. So I used 4 passes to get it down to the thickness I needed and also used the suggestion of sanding to give it a nice smooth fit.

I indeed received two pieces of the thick.

Thank you for the great idea! 4 passes did the trick.

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