Rev Robotics just started taking orders for their fancy laser-cuttable composite sheets, MaxComposite. I’ve ordered some to experiment with but I’d love to hear what others discover. What settings did you find work best on your laser cutter of X power? How well does it stand up to impacts? How flexible? Can you think of this as super strong polycarbonate or weaker (and lighter) aluminum or something else entirely?
It looks like while you can cut this with typical saws to get it down to the size of your laser cutter bed it really wants to have its edges sealed by the laser for any part you are going to use. Your experience?
Thanks Greg. Rather than teams blowing through lots of expensive material it would be most helpful to starting places for different power lasers for the two thicknesses. We’ll still need to tweak those in our shops, of course. Thanks for making this available!
I started trying some small, simple cuts on the laser. We have a 60W Epilog Fusion CO2 laser. I could do some fine-tuning with the focus but it has been pretty well calibrated for our acrylic and plywood parts.
I ran through some material presets to see how any of them did with this material. I have only tested the thinner .1" material so far. I had the best success with the presets for 1/4" acrylic which were (8) speed, (100) power, (100) frequency.
Compared with the materials I’m used to laser cutting, I thought the edge was far from crisp and the kerf from the beam was very wide. Its a melty material. I didn’t like the goopy edges so I tried to clean it up using faster speeds, lower power, and multiple passes, but wasn’t able to get a better result than with the 1/4" acrylic presets.
I was also a little surprised to see how thin the fiber-reinforced layers outside of the core were. This sheet is almost all solid PP core with a very thin veneer layer on each side. We plan to do some torture testing compared with Lexan and aluminum to see how it compares. I did try cutting a braced 90 gusset using the same test settings listed above and it cut out easily. The goopy top edge is something I’ll need to get used to or find a cure for. I can see this replacing some of our sheet/plate parts made on the CNC router, but I don’t see the surface finish or tolerance coming close to the equivalent machined parts.
