Hello. I have a few boss LS1420s (65w) and we’re just starting to get into acrylic cuts. I can’t seem to understand the kerf on acrylic (3mm rowmark cast). Is it generally better to use two passes at lower power and higher speed, or one pass low power slow speed, or something else.
I’ve tried running about 15% power and 8mm/second, and 45 power and 25 mms, but it just seems in both cases that the top of the cut is two wide.
I’d like to be able to do work that fit’s together, but the kerf offset has been a pain and I can’t help but wonder if I’m making rooking mistakes.
Hi Blake. I took at a look at that too because that was my first thought. It’s a 2mm lens on auto focus. I do a ton of etching - I mean in droves on bottles and such, and so I pay a lot of attention to beam size and distance for clarity purposes.
That said, I’ve heard that offsetting the distance by adjusting mm up and away improve focus, I just don’t know if that’s true and wasn’t sure where to even start in testing.
A 2mm lens? I assume that’s a typo? You’d get very shallow depth of cut there.
For kerf, set the offset to half your beam width outward if you’re cutting an inlay, and inward if you’re cutting a pocket. You might have to try a few variations to figure out how much is the right amount, but once you have it you can use that number pretty much forever.