O lawdy the science is real. Finally managed to get some clear acrylic, never engraved acrylic before, clear or coloured… It turns this acrylic black with a weird raised engrave… then I had an idea…
XTool D1 Pro, 2W IR, 6000mm/min, 0.1mm Interval, 1/4" focus depth, 1/2" clear acrylic.
Yes, that engrave is in the center of the acrylic. Fascinating.
It’s one of the materials that isn’t usually viable for engraving with this frequency. It looks pretty good…
I’ll have to see if I can do something similar with my fiber…
Tried it before, it just shown through…
What interval are you using? Looks like you could get away with a smaller interval.
It was 0.1, I was a bit wide 'cause it seems a bit too much heat and it’ll cause some fracturing internally. Likely impurities in the acrylic. I figured I could squeeze it a little more and did 0.09 on this one, you can see some fracturing in this one.
Can you smell the acrylic?
Seems like if your damaging it into vapor, it needs to vent the gas.
Not at all, it’s all contained within the acrylic sheet.
That’s wild.
I wonder if with the proper planning you could create one of those 3D “hologram” like images. If you could adequately control the depth of burn you could create multiple layers to do this…
My mind had thought about this as well, especially since the Snapmaker is planning to release a 2W IR as well soon, and it has a fully controllable Z axis unlike the XTool. Never have the money for all the cool things. 
I was looking at this a while back. This is a video on how the chinese company creates them.
There are a number of videos that try to do this. Most seem to be adds selling them… This one shows one running…
The reason i asked about smell, is that I’m wondering what exactly the beam is doing… 
I had always thought this would require more specialized equipment. But if it can be hacked with commodity hardware that becomes interesting.
I’m hoping over the weekend to try cutting an image into layers, 3D printing some different height focus blocks, and trying to do a depth of field kind of thing. I’ve zero experience with image editing to try cutting certain parts out, but I’ll give it a try. Maybe something 3 layers, boat in front, ocean in middle, background city at the back.
I think the biggest problem so far is heat on parts that are solid black, thus keep the laser on full instead of pulsed dithering. (you can see the deep black parts in the second one, if you look close, it’s a fracture in the acrylic) So if I wash the image out slightly to prevent pure blacks, I think I can stop the internal fracturing of the acrylic.
EDIT: Ehh. A little overlap along the bottom, and only did two layers since I have absolutely zero experience with photo manip. (I literally just used windows paint 3d to magic select the boat, save the background and boat separately, then tried to align by hand in Lightburn. I’m ashamed).
Hi.
IMO as a someone does have a lot of improvement room left in the field of dgital photo manipulation, there’s absolutely no reason to feel ashamed, the result is what matters.
And I do have to say the result -as a feasibility study at least- is very good indeed.
Heaps better than what I’ve ever would have thought.
If that method works with wider variety of acrylic materials, it’ll open up very interesting possibilities for making all sorts of stuff with our IR heads.
One question, how does the lasered image look when illuminated from the side, as the acrylic signs usually are?
Regards,
Sam
Hi.
Thanks for posting the pic.
It sure is.
But not bad at all IMO, could work very nicely in certain applications, for example 19" MI-equipment faceplates.
Now I only have to find some time to dig into that myself.
Regards,
Sam
Anybody know where I can get 3" scrap plexiglass?
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