how do you mill a picture on plastic?

[agileracing]

I am trying to figure out how to mill out a picture out of a sheet of plexiglas on the Microrouter compact, What does the jig look like, and how do we setup the machine?

[bradders]

You could try fixing some sacrificial material to the Aluminium bed of the compact using screws and "T" nuts. Fix your plexiglas to the sacrificial material with double sided tape. Set your OFFSETS and then run your program

[Denford Admin]

There is an in-depth guide to creating Lithophanes using QuickCAM v3 or PRO here

http://www.denfordata.com/pdfs/lithophane_tutorial.pdf

This and other tutorials are available from the Help menus of the latest versions of software.

When we machine plastic we clamp a good quality MDF / fibreboard to the table, then tape the Acrylic sheet down onto it. The double-sided tape is quite adequate as there are no real cutting forces from the small engraving tip.

[Steve]

The help tutorial within Quick CAM or above explain the best feeds speeds, depth of cut and stepovers to use.

Material must be translucent and the depth of relief can be changed to increase contrast (thicker for darker and Thinner for a lighter image).