What method are you using to cut acrylic in house?

[David McCarroll]

Hi Martin,

You can buy a blade for the saw and it’s always a high tooth count and it’s specifically for acrylics and ACM I think. It’s been a long time since we’ve needed one but I’m sure they were about £110 and 96toothcount.

[Martin Pearson]

For acrylic & composite you really need something with a negative rake blade, it will have a high tooth count & they tend to be more expensive than most other blades 😆 😆

[Robert Lambie]

We use a wall saw, festool, cnc router or even jigsaw. just depends what your cutting, size and finish required.

a standard ripsaw with an acrylic cutting blade will do the job to cut sheets etc, but it is important to keep the acrylic totally flat and minimise any vibration with G-clamps / trigger-clamp etc.

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Attachments:

[Duncan Wilkie]

I have attached below a guide to cutting and working with Acrylic.

We use a triple chip saw blade in our table saw and panel saw.

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Attachments:

Plexiglas-Complete-Fabrication.pdf

[Martin Lemiesz]

Thank you all – I think we will get Festool and special blade or try to find a blade to fit our saw… we only need to cut square and rectangular panels (various sizes) we can do shapes using our small router (only 600x1200mm) or jigsaw (using special bosh blade with pleasing results)…

We need rather good finish on the square panels as we normally polish the edges afterward.

[Robert Lambie]

you could always have them cut perfectly from the source you buy your acrylic. either before you take delivery or ask if its an option to cut pre-bought sheets from them for a fee. if you intend polishing them with a flame your obviously going to need the best possible finish.

[Unknown Member]

We always CNC router cut our acrylic…have some handy little tools that give you a great finish…couple of passes with the right diamond bit and it comes off like it’s been polished.

[Martin Pearson]

I don’t have a single method for cutting, really depends on the application, anything large thats going in a frame gets cut on the wall saw, that doesn’t cut small panels very well so small squares/rectangles get cut on the table saw, with the right blade you should be able to get a good enough edge for polishing, quick rub round with a bit of fine wet & dry at most or if it’s in a frame no need to worry to much as the edge is good enough & doesn’t need polished.
Irregular shapes then they get done on the CNC but again for good edge finish you need to be using the right bits & experiment with speed & feed settings.

If it is only occasional & standard size panels then it may be cheaper to buy in rather than produce in house. Really depends on what else you could be doing while you are cutting & polishing the acrylic 😆 😆