I have an industrial estate near me, where there are always skips containing pieces of perspex & plexiglass ....weird shaped offcuts, but nevertheless ideal for me to learn the art of CNC on my homemade CNC
i'm particularly interested in 3mm white sheet, so I thought I'd won the lottery when I found heaps of white engths of 3mm Plexiglas in one particular skip! (& I mean *loads*).
Alas, though this excitement turned out to be premature - no matter what I try, when I come to mill it on my CNC, the darned stuff melts & clogs up my cutting bit ...soon rendering the bit ineffective. Now I've tried slow speeds (800RPM), thru 8,000RPM to no avail - it just melts & clogs the cutter. I'm of the opinion that this particular stuff just isn't meant to be milled (possibly just for laser cutting?)
On the other hand, all the Perspex I've found has cut wonderfully on my machine.
This begs the question.... why?
I's always thought Perspex & Plexiglas were more or less one in the same thing - apparently not. The Plexiglass, has a 'softer' feel to it (flexes more etc)...whereas the Perspex I have seems quite stiff by comparison.
Now it may well be that I was just unlucky & maybe the Plexiglas I found wasn't meant to be milled (I'm sure Plexiglas have more than one product with different composition/structure depending on the end useage).
Has anyone on here got experience of cutting Plexiglas with a CNC machine that can advise? (differences, tips etc)
edit: I found some 'markings' on one piece...it says 05070 ...which apparently translates into White Extruded. A bit of Googling suggests extruded *is* much softer that the other variant cast (which is likely what my perspex is made out of) .....tips seem to be a high feed rate yet slow cutting RPM....I'll give it a bash.