Has anyone mixed frosted acrylic with pocketed lettering, and by frosted I mean sanded on the surface to spread the edge lighting mre evenly, and then pocketing out the lettering to essentially remove the frosting in those areas.
I’d like to get an idea as to if it’s a waste of time and the results will be poor or that I’m a genius and nobody has ever thought that you could improve led edge lit signs like this.
With my track record, I’m leaning towards the first, but I’d like to hear anyone else’s experience on this. I’ve never really worked with acrylic on a CNC before but what I’ve seen seems to have a requirement for almost total darkness for edge lit stuff to be of any use at all.
I’m building a physical dashboard for my servers and would like to use this sort of method an an indicator of the state of various machines.
My experience with cutting acrylic has been that the bits leave a “frosted” look on the cutouts where I need to either flame polish or compound polish the sides. My guess (and I have never done what you suggest) is that would be true for the pocket as well. In any case, would would want to do a super shallow pocket. As an alternative, I might suggest using a McEtcher over the entire surface leaving that portion that you would have pocketed alone. I have found that cast acrylic is notoriously uneven in depth, so a very shallow pocket (just enough to remove the sanded surface) might be difficult to maintain a consistent true pocket depth. The McEtcher solves that problem by being spring loaded. My suggestion may not be practical for a very large area. You didn’t say the size of your substrate.
I wonder if a fancy surfacing Endmill would be effective in skimming the surface to true it up. I expect the tool would need to be exceptionally sharp to do it without needing a good polish after.
Maybe one of the absurdly expensive Stepped single flute Datrons
I suppose the benefit of plastic is that the tool should last quite a while if used correctly.
@Fuzzeh are you looking for the light to highlight the lettering or to highlight the surface around your lettering?
I’m looking for whichever gives me the best contrast really. Edge lit doesn’t seem to be that great. I know that diffused (sanded to about 220) gives pretty good, even spread of light.
I’d need to wait for the bit to be delivered from the US, which will probably be a couple of weeks. I’m prepared to test in the meantime.
I’m also at a loss as to how to essentially invert the text area/background so that the text is left clear and the background ends up frosted with the drag bit. I tried a couple of boolean operations , none of which gave me what I wanted.
In a program such as Photoshop…really any image manipulation program, you can take a basic drawing and use CONTROL+I to invert a black and white image.
This is a graphic design/illustration problem known as “figure-ground reversal” — usually offsetting to add a surround, drawing in a surround, or deleting surrounding geometry is necessary:
if you’re still stuck, upload your file and we will look into it with you.
