CNC laser engraving and cutting mirrored acrylic
CNC laser engraving and cutting mirrored acrylic is a lot of fun, working on a bunch of samples for potential CNCROi.com clients, I decided to use this material to showcase. Yes, we can CNC laser engrave and mark mirror straight-on without blowing-up our machine from the laser beam being reflected back into our tube. This won’t happen with our Austrian CNC laser!
What’s left after a successful CNC laser cut mirrored acrylic application!
As always, I had a few sheets lying around so I put them to good use in the CNC shop. What you see to the right in the photograph is the protective plastic that keeps the mirror looking sharp and clean while it’s stored in inventory.
Mirrored acrylic looks great, in any light, for any application!
After the CNC engraving is done, the next step is cutting out the individual pieces, they are roughly business card sized. This design is pretty simple but the results look great because of the material we used to make it with… mirrored acrylic!
As you can see, we are CNC laser engraving and cutting these pieces mirror faced-up, it’s not a problem when you have quality CNC machinery to do things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. The thickness of this mirrored acrylic is 3 mm.
What are some applications for using this mirrored acrylic? I’ve used it for everything from great looking corporate awards to name badges, it just stands-out so wonderfully! It can be used for interior signage as well, the good thing about this material is that it’s relatively cheap compared to REAL mirror and can be cut into ANY shape.
Engrave first then cut, otherwise the engraving might not be put on the right spot due to movement!
Our CNC laser is a wide format machine, we can handle pieces like this a meter wide by however long you need it done, our only real limit is the size of the sheet that this mirrored acrylic comes in. Depending on the supplier, that’s up to 6 x 8 ft!
The engraving resolution we can achieve on this mirrored acrylic is the same as on paper, north of 1200 dpi but 600 dpi is more than fine, your eye can’t see the difference anyhow. It’s a very easy material to keep clean and can be backed onto something else for added strength, think of a wooden picture frame or even other acrylic.
The process of CNC laser engraving and cutting mirrored acrylic isn’t the cleanest but it does clean-up very nicely!
The advantage of cutting this with our CNC laser is that the sides are flame polished, meaning there isn’t any roughness as you’d get cutting this material out using a CNC router.
I left these a bit dirty otherwise it would be hard to make this out properly using photography.
If you have an application where you need high quality mirrored acrylic engraved and cut using an awesome CNC laser, look no further than CNCROi.com! Here’s a video showing the process being done at various angles.
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