Ok, I have my first engraved acrylic job to do and I am running into a problem. I am trying to reverse engrave some ˝” tall letters on to the backside of some ˝” thick clear acrylic and paint fill them black. The problem I’m having is in trying to achieve a 1/16” depth cleanly. I keep getting a white “haze” around the inside edge of the letters. I have looked through the archives for a solution and the only useful thing I could find is using someone’s suggestion to defocus the lens slightly and also try several passes at a lower power which helps reduce it slightly but does not eliminate it enough. When I paint fill the letters you can see a white halo effect around the edges when you look at it from the front side and it gives them a “gray look”.
The other issue is the horizontal lines that are visible on the letters, I have the raster image density set to 6 (high quality) and have tried both the halftone and diffusing settings, can’t tell much difference.
At 150watts I realize that I have a little more power than most laser engravers, maybe I’m putting too much power down per pass? I started by using the default factory recommended settings in the Universal driver settings which are 75% pwr, 100% spd, 500 ppi, and then began adjusting them down in increments of 10 until I reached about 10% pwr, 100% spd, 500 dpi. At the lower power I can achieve a nearly perfect looking letter but it also takes about 7-8 passes to get there which is just too long. When I defocused, I tried it about 1/8” up with my 2” lens which definitely helps but, it seems to me if I go much more than that the edges start to get fuzzy.
Ideally, it would be nice to be able to do one pass with high power to achieve the desired depth and then one or two additional passes to eliminate the haze, any more than this seems too time consuming, I can achieve a decent looking result on the CNC machine using a 30 deg engraving bit with a 3d tool path but was hoping for a quicker cleaner result with the laser. Anybody have any good suggestions?
Thanks,
Paul