Making a die to stamp leather

[Bob Davis - Sturgis SD]

My new press didn't arrive last week so I haven't been able to try out my new dies. I've been experimenting making dies out of different materials. Tried extruded acrylic and cast acrylic, not seeing much difference in the engraving. Delrin, cool product, takes about 5 passes to get much, leaves behind laser grid lines, might need to defocus and look for better settings, stuff seems fairly indestructible. HDPE, not much luck, need to find better settings, melted like candle wax. Also waiting on the Tough-Cast 65D to arrive to make dies using two part polymer. All this experimenting is probably a waste of time because it looks like acrylic makes a decent die, but I won't know how it wears until I go into production.

Bob

[Mike Null]

I think you have arrived at the same conclusion I did. Acrylic is a good material for this project. The other good thing about acrylic is that I generally have plenty of scrap.

Years ago I made mold patterns for spin casting from acrylic and to avoid the striations on the on the bottom of the engraving I used Post Script fills as a background so there was no plain black area. At that time I was using an Epilog and didn't have the Y axis engraving option the the Trotec has. That may also solve this issue.