I’m looking for help with cutting and engraving on plexiglass roughly 1/4 inch.
I don’t know what help you need here… most recommendations are to not lase fiberglass. Mostly because of the epoxy it’s based on.
I’ve tried fiberglass based pcb’s on my fiber, and they stink to high heaven… they also use an epoxy that the recommendations are don’t lase.
Good luck
Plexiglas is just cast polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), i.e. “acrylic”. There’s also extruded acrylic. I’ve read that cast is better at engraving and gives a better edge when cutting, but I haven’t really researched much.
What kind of laser do you have (or are you thinking of)? My CO2 laser cuts and engraves acrylic like a dream, but my blue-violet diode laser wouldn’t even notice transparent acrylic (although some colors may cut well). Since I have the CO2 laser, I’ve never bothered looking up whether my fiber laser would touch it.
My mistake, for some reason I though he’d asked about fiberglass… 
Thanks for the correction.
My fiber goes through it like a visible diode… so it doesn’t work either …
It’s not fiberglass It’s plexiglass. Two totally different materials
I have a Ray5 10w laser. It’s not Co2.
From what I’ve gleaned in passing, a diode laser such as yours can cut some colors of acrylic (e.g. black, red) and likely won’t touch others (e.g. clear, blue), at least without bodges or workarounds.
If you hunt around for “cutting acrylic with a diode laser”, there are lots of YouTube videos and other resources that may be able to help you. Perhaps some of the diode threads here may be useful, but they tend to have a lot of CO2 people wandering in and not noticing that the topic is about diodes specifically.
(Since I have diode, CO2, and fiber lasers in my shop, I can just use whichever one works best for a job, which makes me less useful a resource for managing less-optimal applications.)
1 Like
Thanks for the input.