How to Cut and Engrave Acrylic with a Laser - xTool D1 10watt

**Tips and Tricks for Cutting Acrylic**

When it comes to cutting acrylic, there are several things to keep in mind to ensure a successful project. One of the most important things is to use a laser that can handle the material with precision and accuracy. The author has found that using a laser with a high-powered beam can help prevent chipping or breaking of the acrylic.

**Dealing with Brittle Material**

Acrylic is a brittle material, which means it can break easily if handled incorrectly. In one instance, the author was trying to cut out a middle piece and accidentally pushed too hard, causing the piece to snap in two. However, this did not deter the author from continuing with their project. Instead, they decided to glue up the broken piece and continue working.

**Gluing Up Broken Acrylic**

To glue up a broken acrylic piece, the author uses Starbond medium CA glue. They also use a small amount of rubbing alcohol to clean the area where the glue will be applied, which helps ensure good adhesion. In one instance, the author used a debonder by Starbond to remove excess glue from the wrong side of a piece. This worked surprisingly well and helped to remove the unwanted glue.

**Jigs and Fixtures**

When working with acrylic, it's often necessary to use jigs or fixtures to hold the material in place while cutting. The author has found that using a jig can be challenging, especially when trying to cut out intricate designs. In one instance, the author used a jig to help them achieve a smooth cut, but found that it was not holding up well.

**Patron Appreciation**

The author would like to take a moment to thank their patrons for their support. They have been with them from the beginning and continue to provide valuable feedback and encouragement. In return, they offer exclusive content and rewards to those who subscribe or become patrons. The author is grateful for the opportunity to share their passion with others.

**A Special Thank You**

To all of the patrons who have joined the build that build community in recent months, the author would like to extend a special thank you. They are thrilled to welcome new members and look forward to continuing to create content that inspires and educates. A shoutout to the top-tier patrons, including Stephen Mann, Eric Weiss, Derek Coates, Chuck Faulkner, Puffy Muffins, Jim Carter, Andy the Viking, Dwight Smith, Christopher Walters, Todd Stewart, and Franklin de Tanklin.

**Final Thoughts**

After completing this project, the author is pleased with the results. They found that using a laser to cut acrylic provided a smooth and accurate finish. The use of CA glue and other adhesives helped to ensure a strong bond between the pieces. While there were some challenges along the way, the author is grateful for the experience and looks forward to continuing to build and create with their community.

**Conclusion**

The author would like to thank everyone who has watched this video and joined them on this journey through acrylic cutting. They hope that you found the tips and tricks helpful and informative. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them in the comments section below. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell for more build content, tutorials, and projects.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys i'm nick and this is build that build a place where if you believe a plastic bag floating in the wind is art get out just get out all right guys on this episode we are going to be laser cutting and engraving on acrylic why because you asked me to wow that really stinks i can smell the acrylic too i do not like the smell of acrylic when it's being cut it stinks it's nasty and it makes me want to go so i've avoided it up until now but you know what you guys keep asking and you know i'm going to do it for you so let's see what we got in the box what's in the box all right all of this acrylic is three millimeter it's all apparently bubble wrapped what we got we have oh fancy so this is some kind of shimmery glittery red stuff schmancy that's funny it comes with a warning like be careful this stuff stinks so the precautions i take since i don't have any sort of enclosure all right that is black acrylic is as once i get the laser started i usually wear a mask when i'm out here and then i kind of step away from the laser and let it do its thing and i just come out here and check on it every once in a while so so is to not burn the joint down if you know what i'm saying so i figured i would take you through my process in green look at that obnoxious green it's green kids green screen green screaming since i don't normally work this material i wanted to take you through my process on how i figure out how to work with said material first things first here's what i do i'm gonna grab green and make sure most acrylic comes with like a coating on top sometimes you can't see it and yeah you want to peel this off first it's really satisfying if you get a big piece oh yeah there we go watch that oh asmr asmr bdb so here we go we'll pop it into a laser machine next up i grab this what is this this is the guide on xtools website for the material report list and it tells you uh it gives you basic settings now say that it's always still only basic settings right because like other things play in temperature in the shop how much humidity is in the air so use this as a jumping off point so what i'm going to do is try their settings first and see if they work if not we'll uh we'll start doing some test burns and why not and so this just has semi-clear acrylic black acrylic and yellow acrylic on it i am going to assume that is that how many millimeters is that yeah it's all three millimeter so this is a thickness guide on it too i'm gonna use i think yeah it looks about the same uh i'm gonna use the settings for three millimeter black acrylic it's gonna bring our laser over here actually should probably i was working with 3m material so that should be right but just in case settings in the xtool material report list say to do this at 100 power 3 millimeter per second 2 passes i will also link to this materials list in the description down below right run a quick frame looking good fire up hello and that did not work so let's take a look at the back just to be sure so i don't know how well you can see that but i can see this faint little line in there which makes me think that maybe three passes sort of popped this out all right so three passes works let's see how we're looking here no burning or anything i'm not really concerned about it um catching them far okay for this next one we're going to try a uh a raster engrave and a cut so just again we want to check our frame okay i think that's focused better kind of hard i've got a little tracking thing on there but it looks pretty good i mean the engrave is tiny because i don't want to take up too much space but i'm pretty clear from where i'm standing look at that look at that new logo sweet okay so now we're going to move on to something a little bit more complicated since i think patty's day is coming up i figured i would stop real quick and let you know that if it is still before st patrick's day which i can't remember when it actually is i think it's 21st this year maybe um xtool is running a huge sale right now and just too many different things to go over in just a video so i'll put a link down below follow that link check out their sales there's a bunch of deep discounts all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to cut out a celtic knot so uh roll that beautiful laser bean footage beans hmm okay it is the next day i spent most of the night last night uh cutting these out and failing miserably to a certain degree uh most of it was user error though so i wanted to go over a couple of the things that i messed up the first thing is when you're cutting acrylic i don't know if i have a good example this one obviously didn't cut all that through but when you're cutting acrylic the heat of the laser can cause it to kind of curl up on the edge and what had happened was this curled up and it caught my air assist and just snapped it right off so i just kind of stepped out for a few minutes came back and found my whole piece shifted over and all that stuff this is something more that i see very commonly uh where people are like i don't know what happened more than likely if you have this shift and it looks like your uh your material has shifted the drag chain or something on the laser has caught onto your material and moved it and put you in a precarious situation so just keep that in mind we learn from our mistakes right so make sure that you secure your piece uh what i use a lot of time are these really flat magnets like that's three of them so i only i use whatever material i need nice so these guys are really thin so a lot of times the laser will pass over them and then i stack them as needed uh for whatever material i'm using i can link these in the bio down below these are pretty handy so thing two of thing one and thing two that may happen to you while you're cutting acrylic is acrylic is brittle so you need to be careful and i was in the process of trying to get some of these middle pieces out and i pushed too hard and i snapped this piece off now i had the time and the material so i did go ahead and re-cut it but since what this is one of the deeper layers you could definitely glue this up and you probably wouldn't even see the see where it was broken okay so in order to glue this up i went ahead and cut two panels like this these are so the the actual mandala is 140 millimeters so these are 141 millimeters i'm going to be using starbonne medium ca glue um and a little accelerator actually probably not accelerated right now but starbond uh for these projects uh good ca glue is always the best bet and i happen to be an affiliate with starbond and i can get you 15 off your order so if you need ca glue if you don't have siegel in your shop you need ca glue follow the link in my description and um save you some money okay so we're gonna push this down okay and just using a little rubbing alcohol to clean these off just so we get a good adhesion adhesion kids that's your word for the day adhesion put a jig on that off pop this guy out yeah that's wrong that okay so i accidentally put the glue on the wrong side of this i've been dying to try this stuff it's a debonder by starbond and it's supposed to take the glue off so let's see how it does oh wow that really works that works man look at that i don't know how well you can tell because it's black but see all that white that's all where the glue was but the black is where it's taking it off there so let's do the rest of this so the jig's not wanting to behave and i think i know why when i cut the second one i did not so i cut the first one at 141 millimeters i cut the second one 140 so it's so tight on this thing that i can't get it to stay so we're using the old tried and true hold it with your fingers method you know ca glue all over your fingers when you're after you get done with doing these you're not doing it right or you're doing it way better than i am we're doing this last bit of gluing up i would just like to say thank you for sticking around until the end of the video it is mucho appreciated oh if you like this video hit that like button if you've not subscribed please consider subscribing i'm getting very close to 100 000 subs and that would just be an awesome mile marker to hit i would like to say an extra special thanks to all of my patrons these guys right here they're the ones that keep me knee deep in ca glue right all right especially my top tier or boiler maker patrons stephen mann eric weiss derek coates chuck faulkner puffy muffins jim carter andy the viking dwight smith christopher walters todd stewart and franklin de tanklin i think franklin the tanklin has just joined up so let's say hi shall we hello franklin the tanklin i would clinky's you but it's like 11 in the morning all right so this guy's had enough time to dry now so i figured we'd just check it out what do you think i dig it i think this piece right here is backwards i think i put that in the wrong way because those are the only two that cross the wrong way but other than that the depth is awesome i think it looks really cool kind of almost would have liked to have had like another color green in there maybe they just didn't think i wouldn't start check out the sparkly red stuff did you check her out so the only difference with this was i did run four passes with the cut and i think that's only due to the fact that this is a little transparent like you can see through it a little bit so i think you just need to get one more to get that solid cut on there oh looks good check that business out see you can see through it nice nice no all right guys thanks for taking this trip to acrylic ville with me and until next time thanks for playing and now i gotta get to work what's up guys i'm nick i am nick i'm nick and this is build that build and she's dead wrapped in plastic step on this frog oh i think i stepped onwhat's up guys i'm nick and this is build that build a place where if you believe a plastic bag floating in the wind is art get out just get out all right guys on this episode we are going to be laser cutting and engraving on acrylic why because you asked me to wow that really stinks i can smell the acrylic too i do not like the smell of acrylic when it's being cut it stinks it's nasty and it makes me want to go so i've avoided it up until now but you know what you guys keep asking and you know i'm going to do it for you so let's see what we got in the box what's in the box all right all of this acrylic is three millimeter it's all apparently bubble wrapped what we got we have oh fancy so this is some kind of shimmery glittery red stuff schmancy that's funny it comes with a warning like be careful this stuff stinks so the precautions i take since i don't have any sort of enclosure all right that is black acrylic is as once i get the laser started i usually wear a mask when i'm out here and then i kind of step away from the laser and let it do its thing and i just come out here and check on it every once in a while so so is to not burn the joint down if you know what i'm saying so i figured i would take you through my process in green look at that obnoxious green it's green kids green screen green screaming since i don't normally work this material i wanted to take you through my process on how i figure out how to work with said material first things first here's what i do i'm gonna grab green and make sure most acrylic comes with like a coating on top sometimes you can't see it and yeah you want to peel this off first it's really satisfying if you get a big piece oh yeah there we go watch that oh asmr asmr bdb so here we go we'll pop it into a laser machine next up i grab this what is this this is the guide on xtools website for the material report list and it tells you uh it gives you basic settings now say that it's always still only basic settings right because like other things play in temperature in the shop how much humidity is in the air so use this as a jumping off point so what i'm going to do is try their settings first and see if they work if not we'll uh we'll start doing some test burns and why not and so this just has semi-clear acrylic black acrylic and yellow acrylic on it i am going to assume that is that how many millimeters is that yeah it's all three millimeter so this is a thickness guide on it too i'm gonna use i think yeah it looks about the same uh i'm gonna use the settings for three millimeter black acrylic it's gonna bring our laser over here actually should probably i was working with 3m material so that should be right but just in case settings in the xtool material report list say to do this at 100 power 3 millimeter per second 2 passes i will also link to this materials list in the description down below right run a quick frame looking good fire up hello and that did not work so let's take a look at the back just to be sure so i don't know how well you can see that but i can see this faint little line in there which makes me think that maybe three passes sort of popped this out all right so three passes works let's see how we're looking here no burning or anything i'm not really concerned about it um catching them far okay for this next one we're going to try a uh a raster engrave and a cut so just again we want to check our frame okay i think that's focused better kind of hard i've got a little tracking thing on there but it looks pretty good i mean the engrave is tiny because i don't want to take up too much space but i'm pretty clear from where i'm standing look at that look at that new logo sweet okay so now we're going to move on to something a little bit more complicated since i think patty's day is coming up i figured i would stop real quick and let you know that if it is still before st patrick's day which i can't remember when it actually is i think it's 21st this year maybe um xtool is running a huge sale right now and just too many different things to go over in just a video so i'll put a link down below follow that link check out their sales there's a bunch of deep discounts all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to cut out a celtic knot so uh roll that beautiful laser bean footage beans hmm okay it is the next day i spent most of the night last night uh cutting these out and failing miserably to a certain degree uh most of it was user error though so i wanted to go over a couple of the things that i messed up the first thing is when you're cutting acrylic i don't know if i have a good example this one obviously didn't cut all that through but when you're cutting acrylic the heat of the laser can cause it to kind of curl up on the edge and what had happened was this curled up and it caught my air assist and just snapped it right off so i just kind of stepped out for a few minutes came back and found my whole piece shifted over and all that stuff this is something more that i see very commonly uh where people are like i don't know what happened more than likely if you have this shift and it looks like your uh your material has shifted the drag chain or something on the laser has caught onto your material and moved it and put you in a precarious situation so just keep that in mind we learn from our mistakes right so make sure that you secure your piece uh what i use a lot of time are these really flat magnets like that's three of them so i only i use whatever material i need nice so these guys are really thin so a lot of times the laser will pass over them and then i stack them as needed uh for whatever material i'm using i can link these in the bio down below these are pretty handy so thing two of thing one and thing two that may happen to you while you're cutting acrylic is acrylic is brittle so you need to be careful and i was in the process of trying to get some of these middle pieces out and i pushed too hard and i snapped this piece off now i had the time and the material so i did go ahead and re-cut it but since what this is one of the deeper layers you could definitely glue this up and you probably wouldn't even see the see where it was broken okay so in order to glue this up i went ahead and cut two panels like this these are so the the actual mandala is 140 millimeters so these are 141 millimeters i'm going to be using starbonne medium ca glue um and a little accelerator actually probably not accelerated right now but starbond uh for these projects uh good ca glue is always the best bet and i happen to be an affiliate with starbond and i can get you 15 off your order so if you need ca glue if you don't have siegel in your shop you need ca glue follow the link in my description and um save you some money okay so we're gonna push this down okay and just using a little rubbing alcohol to clean these off just so we get a good adhesion adhesion kids that's your word for the day adhesion put a jig on that off pop this guy out yeah that's wrong that okay so i accidentally put the glue on the wrong side of this i've been dying to try this stuff it's a debonder by starbond and it's supposed to take the glue off so let's see how it does oh wow that really works that works man look at that i don't know how well you can tell because it's black but see all that white that's all where the glue was but the black is where it's taking it off there so let's do the rest of this so the jig's not wanting to behave and i think i know why when i cut the second one i did not so i cut the first one at 141 millimeters i cut the second one 140 so it's so tight on this thing that i can't get it to stay so we're using the old tried and true hold it with your fingers method you know ca glue all over your fingers when you're after you get done with doing these you're not doing it right or you're doing it way better than i am we're doing this last bit of gluing up i would just like to say thank you for sticking around until the end of the video it is mucho appreciated oh if you like this video hit that like button if you've not subscribed please consider subscribing i'm getting very close to 100 000 subs and that would just be an awesome mile marker to hit i would like to say an extra special thanks to all of my patrons these guys right here they're the ones that keep me knee deep in ca glue right all right especially my top tier or boiler maker patrons stephen mann eric weiss derek coates chuck faulkner puffy muffins jim carter andy the viking dwight smith christopher walters todd stewart and franklin de tanklin i think franklin the tanklin has just joined up so let's say hi shall we hello franklin the tanklin i would clinky's you but it's like 11 in the morning all right so this guy's had enough time to dry now so i figured we'd just check it out what do you think i dig it i think this piece right here is backwards i think i put that in the wrong way because those are the only two that cross the wrong way but other than that the depth is awesome i think it looks really cool kind of almost would have liked to have had like another color green in there maybe they just didn't think i wouldn't start check out the sparkly red stuff did you check her out so the only difference with this was i did run four passes with the cut and i think that's only due to the fact that this is a little transparent like you can see through it a little bit so i think you just need to get one more to get that solid cut on there oh looks good check that business out see you can see through it nice nice no all right guys thanks for taking this trip to acrylic ville with me and until next time thanks for playing and now i gotta get to work what's up guys i'm nick i am nick i'm nick and this is build that build and she's dead wrapped in plastic step on this frog oh i think i stepped on\n"