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.
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.
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.
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.
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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