Hey guys,
I recently got icube w10 engraver, after testing on wood it engraved perfectly.
However, it won’t work on acrylic. It’s shooting laser, but comes out blank.
My settings are 2000mm max power 32 as fill
Lines per inch 317 and I also tried 400.
Under Move tab, distance is set to 5mm speed 600m. I set s-max as 1000. Could anyone lmk any reasons why it might not be engraving?
I am new to using laser machine so I want to learn as much as I can!
Thanks all
I don’t see what you are trying to engrave, but if it is clear acrylic then the wavelength that a diode laser generates is not suitable for this task.
It’s PMMA acrylic sheets 2.8mm in blue color. Does this apply to what you refer also?
Hi.
Welcome to the LB forum @whitesky .
Just like @bernd.dk there said, low power blue lasers can’t directly engrave even semitransparent acrylics, only some solid colours like black.
You can however use indirect methods, like paint on either side of the (semi)transparent sheet, or having a metal or paper backing on the sheet.
All acrylics aren’t the same either, so the method/coating that works with some varities, may not work on all of them.
At least not the way one expects.
You won’t be able to engrave that with a 10W diode.
Regards,
Sam
Blue color does not work. The laser emits blue light, which gets totally reflected by the material. The only acrylic colors that can be used are black and dark colors like red and green, but no blue. This holds for every material.
You can engrave others by painting the material, just take a look at thousands of YouTube videos.
what a random color I chose 
thanks!!
After some research, I switched to orange transparent sheet and it does great job on engraving. However 500/100power passcount:5, it will only cut the acrylic to maybe 95-97% not all the way, there are few spots with hole. am I missing something, if you could suggest any pls do.
diode lasers are pretty tedious to cut through certain acrylic, especially it being 10watt diode, usually I recommend doing ATLEAST a 40watt Co2 if I’m cutting acrylic. diodes are good for engraving and like misken said dark colored acrylics but it’ll be pretty slow.
Hi.
Visible wavelenght lasers like our blue diodes, are rather inefficient and very slow when cutting acrylic products, Co2 is the way to go if acrylics need to be cut.
But, Co2 is a leap most hobbyist nowadays when inexpensive and virtually maintenance free diode lasers exist don’t want -or won’t be able- to take for any number of reasons, so we are pretty much stuck with our 5-20W and some 40W blue (and 2W near IR) diode lasers.
The ability to engrave and even cut orange tint acrylic sheet makes sense since it’s the very tint that’s used in blue diode laser protective sheets.
That alone makes it usually more expensive than other tints, even though it may (and usually don’t) meet the absorption percentages required for safety applications.
Blue tint on the other hand, seems to be rather common and therefore usually the cheapest.
There are many possible reasons for that.
Most likely one is that either the tint isn’t uniform or melting the acrylic changes the properties of the tint, hindering or removing its ability to absorb the laser energy.
At some point the depth of field (DOF) of the laser beam will affect the laser dot diameter at the melting point, but with ~3mm material thickness that shouldn’t be a problem.
There’s not much that can be done if the properties of the tint are the cause of the problems, other than extensive testing altering the cutting parameters.
The beotch of it is the fact that the next batch -or even the next sheet- may not behave the same way.
So when the sheet changes, a some sort of a test cut is a very good idea.
Actively compensating for the DOF will require some accurate means of manipulating the distance between the laser and the workpiece, usually either a Z axis table, or a Z axis for the head, and a controller to match.
DOF can be compensated by passive means also by changing the focal point from the surface of the workpiece to 1/3-1/2 of the thckness of the material.
Good luck 
Regards,
Sam
