We received a number of inquiries whether the machine can cut shrinking plastic board. And here are the results of our trial!
As it is often used for making scale-models so we mainly used 0.3mm thick board in gray, white, and clear.
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It turned out that the 0.3mm thick gray shrink plastic board is the best fit for Laser cutting and engraving!
—–Gray 0.3mm thick (Weaver)—–
—Processing conditions—
-Machine: FABOOL Laser Mini (1.6W)
-Processing method: vector method
-Processing parameters: 400mm/min, 100% laser power, repeated 2 times.
-Data: sample data, squares and angles, from our website(http://smartdiys.com/sample/) and vector and raster sample data, also from our website, and data of wheels found online.
It only took 1-2 mins for each data to finish processing. (Of course it depends on the size though.)
When we tried high power + low speed, the cut surface was melted and did not turn out nicely, but by cutting repeatedly instead of once, we got better outcome.
—–Next is the white 0.2mm thick shrink plastic board (Tamiya)—–
—Processing conditions—
-Machine: FABOOL Laser Mini (1.6W)
-Processing method: vector method
-Processing parameters: 400mm/min, 40% laser power, repeated 10 times.
-Data: sample data, squares and angles, from our website(http://smartdiys.com/sample/) and vector and raster sample data, also from our website, and data of wheels found online.
Since white board reflects laser, it required more time than the gray one.
It took about 5 minutes to finish this because of 10 times of repeated processing.
Still, the texts and other detail parts are a bit unclear.
This might be only for this shrink plastic board, but when we cut it, it produced black stuff that looks like soot.
—–Lastly, 0.3mm thick transparent board.—–
Since transparent board also reflects laser, it could not be cut with FABOOL Laser Mini, but Smart Laser CO2 could do it quite smoothly.
—Processing conditions—
-Machine: Smart Laser CO2
-Processing method: vector method
-Processing parameters: 600mm/min, 5% laser power, 0 repeated-processing.
-Data: sample data, squares and angles, from our website(http://smartdiys.com/sample/) and vector and raster sample data, also from our website, and data of wheels found online.
It took less than 1 minute to complete processing, but because of the strong laser power, texts and detail parts did not turn out finely.
Based on our test above, we recommend the 0.3mm thick gray plastic board!
