The company I work for just gave me a new project on our laser — and it’s something we haven’t done before.
They want to engrave plaques using 1/16” HLFIPI Laserable Exterior Engraving Plastic. The goal is to laser away the silver top layer and expose the blue bottom layer cleanly.
Has anyone here worked with this material before? If so, what settings did you have success with?
I’m thinking higher speed and lower power to avoid overburning, but I’m concerned about potential discoloration or melting since we’re trying to cleanly remove just that top silver layer.
Any recommended starting points for speed/power/frequency? Also curious if air assist made a big difference for you.
About fast as it’ll go with as little power as will fire the tube worked for these plant tags done in Trolase:
They ran at 400 mm/s and 15% of a 60 W CO₂ laser. I peeled the film off, other folks leave it on. I used assist air, other folks turn it off. The fire may not be optional, depending on your machine.
Your mileage will certainly vary!
You’re gonna run a Material Test at some point, so you may as well sacrifice a few square inches of the stuff right away. A few steps of speed upward from 300 mm/s and powers between 10 and 20% should find the sweet spot fairly quickly.
Ours is 120W CO2 so I just doubled your settings for a start and got a decent result. It was a little hazy so Im going to test another without the Air Assist. If that doesn’t work, I will just cut my power down a bit and go from there. I appreciate your help!
I did out full run (Only 4 plaques) - I think they looked great located on the wall where they will go, company didnt like them up close, they said they look “too choppy”. Do you have any suggestions to minimize that?
Back of the envelope says the letters have 60 scan lines. If that’s with a Line Interval of 0.1 mm = 254 LPI, then the letters are 6 mm tall and that’s about as good as it’s going to get.
Running a Line Interval test versus power level might let you get better results. Figure out the minimum power level that reliably fires the laser and go upward with 2% steps. An interval below 0.1 mm probably won’t buy anything, as the focused spot size will be around 0.2 mm, so start at 0.1 mm and work upward in 0.05 mm steps.
With a 120 W laser, that will likely torch right through the acrylic on those little letters, because there’s no way to throttle the power low enough to compensate for the low speeds around tight curves.
Worth testing, but definitely not on The Good Stuff.
I did get some line interval tests in, that was definetly the issue. I also did manage to get our art department to approve making all text on the plawue a hair bigger so should be no issue now. I appreciate your help!
