Carving stencyls in placemats

[YannLapointe]

Hi everyone, brand new in the CNC world. I bought my first generic CNC 3018 and we can tell, I’m a noob!!! Of course, I searched about this topic before creating a new post. Is it possible to carve letters & logos into placemats? The one I have at home are 0.5mm thick. If I glue/tape them onto a spoilboard, that can be achieved?

I already used easel and candle, so the design is not the question here.

I did some, years ago with the same placemats and cutting it by hand with an exacto.

I did my last name in different sizes so I can spray paint my name onto my tools. (Placemat are kinda “bendable”)

What do you think? Someone here did something like this before, or be willing to try it?

Thanks

[Bricbasher]

Hey Yann,

I don’t see why you couldn’t do this. You could experiment in Easel with running the toolpath on/inside/outside of your drawn line and see what works best. Best thing to do is just get in there and experiment. Go slow at first, whatever works best for your setup and tweak the speed from there.

You could eventually look at a drag knife setup. Here’s a link to what that entails.

How To Use A Drag Knife With A CNC Router

Good luck and have fun!

-Jonathan

[NeilFerreri1]

@Bricbasher

Go slow at first, whatever works best for your setup and tweak the speed from there

You’ll want to go fast. I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to cut this in one pass, but keep the feedrate as fast as your machine can handle. Those thin plastic cutting boards are usually HDPE which is a soft plastic. If you feed too slow, you’ll get melting and cause problems.
You’ll also want to use ca glue and tape to hold the entire area to be cut.

[YannLapointe]

What kind of bit would you use. Bricbasher suggested the drag knife, witch sounds pretty good but what you guys think about this kind of bit :

[Bricbasher]

This. Do this, Neil knows better than me.