Machining plastics with CNC

[Ben Mitchell]

Well, I appreciate the offer but I need 8 square feet of the stuff (sized into .75/1" x12x12 squares) - a bit much for me to ask anyone. I'd rather just spend the 200 bucks and buy whatever I need.

Carpet tape I have and it works great - in the past I've used it to mount my workpiece onto a piece of plywood. The plywood, however, warps.

I could, of course, tape it right to the bed of the router - that's a possibility that for some reason I never thought of. Duh.

The amount of material I'm moving is not much (a few millimeters at a time) - the problem is thermal expansion and warping due to heat buildup - I'm almost certain it is heat buildup because the problem does not occur on smaller pieces.

Also, would tape stick to UHMWP?

As far as machinability goes - will UHMWP warp under the heat, will PVC? What is the better of the two options? How fast will they kill my router bits?

I feel like I have a million questions - I have never used this stuff before and want as much advice as I can get before I start working. I'm also on a time crunch in that I need to get this done by mid-april, so prototyping and testing time is limited.