n: how to make a multi-layered acrylic and LED sculpture with variable lighting levels

Step 5 Laser cutting

We placed the first piece of acrylic on the bed of the laser cutter and then focused the cutter. We set the cutter head to just inside the top left corner of the bit of acrylic. A red dot of light on the material you are cutting shows where the head is set to.

Then the lid gets closed, the extractor started to remove any fumes during cutting, and the file is printed from the Corel Draw document to the laser cutter 'printer', using the print preview to do a last minute check before printing. The file then spools to the laser cutter and details of it appear on the screen on the front of the machine.

If the cutter is focused, lid down, and extractor on, then you can now press start and the laser cutter will start cutting your file. Once it has finished switch off the extraction and open the lid to retrieve the acrylic. On this machine we pressed delete and delete to remove the file before sending the next file to print.

We repeated with each of the further 4 files until all layers were cut and etched. You should re-focus the cutter each time to ensure a correct cut.

The etching took around 50 minutes to complete. The cut sheets around 8, 10, 13 and 4mins.

Then, handling them using white cotton gloves, we cleaned the sheets with a window cleaning spray to remove finger prints and other marks.