Acrylic CNC Machining

Why RapidDone CNC Acrylic Machining?

Are you looking for a professional CNC machining manufacturer for your plexiglass project? Great news! RapidDone can be one of your best solutions for that.

As a well-known and reputed manufacturer of acrylic machined parts, we have a lot of in-house machines including a cutting machine, CNC lathe, CNC milling machine, CNC router. Therefore, we have a strong manufacturing capability and can use different processes to finish your perspex and acrylic projects at a competitive price on time.

RapidDone has a lot of manufacturing experiences since we are over 10 years in the industry. Therefore, we built up a great engineering team, we can use our strong custom design capability to achieve your business requirement. No matter how complicated your acrylic project, we can always work out a suitable solution.

As an ISO 9001 certified shop, we strictly follow the quality rules to manage the product quality. We can guarantee your parts will be safe when you leave your order at RapidDone. We are qualified to serve you and your customers.

In a word, we love what we are doing right now. We care about the trust and privilege you give to us, therefore, we always do our best to manufacture high-quality acrylic machined parts for our customers.

If you have acrylic machining work and want a trusted partner. Don’t delay to contact the RapidDone team. It is better to choose us!

CNC Acrylic Machining – The Complete Guild

Finding Acrylic CNC machined parts can be easy, as all you need is a good CNC machining supplier from China, like Rapiddone. But, if you want to know more about the whole process of acrylic part manufacturing, you need to dig into more.

Well, worry no more, you are in the right place now.

Today in this guide, we are going to cover everything you should know about acrylic machining- from material selection, machining parameters setting, finishing selection, and many more.

Keep reading….and you will be an expert when dealing with your acrylic project.

Acrylic Overview

Acrylic material is an abbreviation of “polymethyl methacrylate”, it is also called Plexiglass, perspex, or PMMA. This material is a transparent thermoplastic, it is often used as a shatterproof alternative to glass and optical parts.

There are two basic types of acrylic, cast acrylic, and extruded acrylic, they are manufactured in two different ways. 

The first one being Cast acrylic, which is made by casting the poly resin into a mold or a tool. By using this manufacturing way, it creates less internal stress. Thus, it is perfect to be used as a CNC machining material and laser cutting material. 

Extruded acrylic, on the other hand, is made by forcing the poly resin between a set of steel dies to form a continuous one big size sheet, then is cut into small size sheets. This type of material has a wide range of thicknesses from 1mm to 25mm. Compared with cast acrylic, it has more internal stress, so it is ideal for laser cutting but not good for CNC machining. 

What Is The Advantage Of Using Acrylic As CNC Machined Material?

Acrylic is one of the common materials that is used as a machining material. Why? There are several reasons including the following.

First, it has a perfect impact on strength. Compared with glass material, this material is 5 times stronger.

Next, it has excellent transparency. The typical transparency rate can reach about 92%, this is the best among all clear engineering material in the industry. 

Thirdly, acrylic has a better durable and anti-UV ability. That is to say, this can lead to low light loss and better cosmetics. Similar material is polycarbonate, but polycarbonate does not have such property, it is easier to turn yellow under outdoor sunshine. 

Lastly, acrylic is good at polishing. Because of this, we can use the polishing process to easily remove the ugly mark created from the CNC machining process. 

What Machine Can Cut Acrylic?

Acrylic is a typical plastic material that can be machined with a lot of machining processes.

There is a lot of machines that can be used to cut acrylic material.
The typical types are as below:

• Acrylic laser cutting machine
• Acrylic engraving machine
• Perspex etching machine
• Acrylic milling machine
• Acrylic manual cutting machine
• Mini acrylic laser cutting machine
• Acrylic die cut machine

What Are The Typical Finishes For Acrylic Machined Parts?

There are many finishes for a CNC machined acrylic part. 

However, the most common finish for an acrylic machining part is polishing. By using the polishing process, it can remove the visible marks on the surfaces easily. Meanwhile, if you polish deeper, we can get a high gloss finish for the surfaces.

Texture finish, on the other hand, is another common finish for the CNC acrylic part. This process involves the utilization of a sand spray way. By using this way, we can get a different depth of textures to fulfill different cosmetic requirements.

What Are The Applications For Acrylic CNC Machined Parts?

Acrylic parts cover most of the manufacturing industry, including the lighting industry, automobile industry, advertisement banners, and others. 

Due to its’ excellent optical transparency, acrylic is the most popular material for lighting applications, including light pipes, lens, decoration parts, and more.

In a word, you will see acrylic parts everywhere.

What Are The Positive Tips For Acrylic CNC Machining Process?

There is quite a number and the main tips include below:

1. Secure Your Workpiece Firmly

We all know that vibration is the biggest enemy for the CNC machining process, this principle also applies to acrylic machining. In another word, it will ruin all your machining work if the part is not held down firmly.

However, how to make sure the part is held down firmly? There are several different ways depending on different parts sizes.

First, when we handle small acrylic parts, we should clamp them by using jigs or vises. 

Next, we have the big size acrylic parts. In this situation, it might be difficult to use jigs or vises. Instead, the best way is to use glue or tape if we want to have the part fixed on the working table firmly. 

However, you need to know that both ways take handling time. If you want to have a higher working efficiency, we suggest buying a vacuum hold table.

2. Make The Right Decision For Cutting Tool Selection

The chip is the enemy of acrylic CNC machining, it is important to remove the acrylic chip out from the flutes during the machining process quickly.

To handle this perfectly, we suggest using special bits designed for acrylic cutting for machining. For example, when we handle the acrylic drilling work, it is better to choose a 60 degrees driller, but not the normal 120 degrees type.

Meanwhile, it is ideal to pick a bigger and sharper bit, because this can help you to get faster and more stable machining for material removal. 

3. Set The Machining Feed Rate Correctly

We all know that a faster feed rate leads to a higher cutting efficiency. However, a high feed rate may create too much heat to melt the acrylic part. Hence, it is important to choose a proper machining feed rate. 

Basic on our manufacturing experience at RapidDone, 75-300 IPM seems to be a good figure. However, the specific figure will have to depend on your cutting tool size. That being said, you can always use a higher figure with a bigger size bit or a lower feed rate with a small bit. 

4. Correctly Set The RPM

RPM is an important machining parameter for Acrylic cutting.

If the RPM is set too high, the bits can generate too much heat and ruin the machined part surface.  Therefore, we need to set the RPM correctly if we want to have a successful cutting.

RPM is affected by many parameters such as bit size, cutting depth, federate. However, we suggest a typical RPM at 15000-20000 RPM as the initial set based on our rich manufacturing experience. After a while, you can try to adjust the figures to get the ideal machining result.   

5. Set The Cut Depth Properly

As for this parameter, we suggest using twice the diameter of the bit for the uniform cut to get a good result for your acrylic cutting. 

6. Coolants For Both Material And Cutting

The coolants can help to lower machining temperature and remove the acrylic chips, so it is always important to have coolants during acrylic CNC machining.

However, there are two tricks to this. 

First, we suggest cooling the acrylic material for an hour before cutting. 

Secondly, we suggest taking cooling action for both machined material and bit.  

7. Prevent The Clogging Up Issue

It is important to make sure you prevent acrylic chips from clogging up the flutes. Once that starts happening, you start melting plastic and things go downhill fast.

Therefore, we suggest to kill this problem at the very beginning, you can even pause the CNC machine to do a more thorough cleaning once this issue happen.

What Are The Typical Processes Of Acrylic Machining?

We can use a lot of CNC machining processes for Acrylic material, the main tips are as below.

1. CNC Acrylic Routing

We have the high capacity to manufacture perspex parts with a CNC router. With our CNC routing machines, we can take consistent and high-quality work and improves productivity. As the leading CNC routing acrylic provider, RapidDone can create and deliver products within the scheduled time.

2. CNC Acrylic Engraving

RapidDone is a perfect and excellent CNC acrylic engraving manufacturer. With our engraving machining services, we can support you with a great kind of acrylic item. We can offer you the best solution at a very affordable price.

3. CNC Acrylic Cutting

We have wide-expertise in manufacturing high-quality acrylic parts by using the cutting process. Laser-cutting is the most typical cutting process to build acrylic parts. Laser-cut can get smooth and beautiful edges, so you can save costs on the polishing process.

This video shows you how to laser cut acrylic parts.

4. CNC Milling Acrylic Machining

CNC milling acrylic machining is the process that creates acrylic and plexiglass parts by using 3-axis CNC machines and 5-axis CNC machines. This process is ideal to create complicated parts for both prototyping and volume production. At RapidDone, we can fully support your special requirements.

5. CNC Turning Acrylic

CNC turning is ideal to create any type of cylindrical, gear, rounded parts with the hole, grooves, and slot features. At RapidDone, we can use this process to produce acrylic shift knobs, perspex knobs, perspex pulleys and shafts, acrylic flywheels, acrylic disc cam, and more. We have a full range of turning machining experience creating what you desired for your application.

6. Die-Cutting Acrylic

This process can be used to cut a thin acrylic sheet into a customized size by using a die. Since we use a die, we can make an identical cut into material numerous times. Therefore, we can create acrylic parts at a high production efficiency leading to a low cost. As a top product supplier, RapidDone is your ideal provider of any acrylic Die-cutting project.

Conclusion

Well, that is everything you need to know about CNC acrylic manufacturing.

With this information, I hope that you can now control better for your new acrylic part project. 

As you do this, remember that you don’t have to do it alone. When you have an acrylic project, RapidDone is here to offer you guidance and assistance every step of the way.