I cut some colorcore today for the first time. It went pretty good except for all these little tails of polymer hanging onto the design. Anyone got any hints on how to avoid and/or remove them? Right now it looks like exacto knife time.
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Rubbing the cut areas with a cloth (I think micro-fiber was suggested) is supposed to remove the majority of such.
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don’t melt the plastic, cut it. Means: avoid heat like the devil the holy water.
Only use O-flutes: just one cutting edge.
Slow RPM: the less it rubs, the less heat. And get away with the hot thing, the bit, from the place as fast as possible: highest possible speed.
So: O-flute, low RPM, high speed.
And produce chips, no melt, and try on scrap.
To remove those in wood inlays I use small brass / nylon brushes, there are also pen like brushes like these:
really useful
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I’ve not seen these in pen form. Thanks for sharing, I’ll definitely be picking up a few 
And Kevin, if you have to use a knife to clean this one up because the chips were too melty for a cloth, I’d try scraping with the blade first (like a card scraper with wood)
I feel like that would have a lower chance of accidentally gouging/creating an unintentional filet 
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Oh. I use those for TIG welds… gotta go dig…
Thanks all. Very helpful. The resolution of the design is great so I definitely want to keep playing with these. Besides, being a polymer chemist, it’s staying closer to home (tho wood is also a polymer).
Thanks
K
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I have done a decent amount in ColorCore and found that the pocket surface is not good when using O flute bits. I started using just the regular #102 with about 8500rpm and got a pocket that was almost glass like.
I use the O flute for cutting. Trying to mix the two on a pocket wasn’t ideal for me either.
If the central color is white it likely won’t matter. If it’s a dark color it does. Do some experimenting and see what works best for your cases.
I can get most of those fuzzies cleaned up with a fingernail but do scrape with the xacto or a dental tool when that won’t work.
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Happily it is white. It does look messy if you get up close but it’s decent at a couple of feet. I’ll try rerunning it with this advice.
I use O-flute endmills and I have found its important to pay attention to your chipload, run slowish RPM (i ran it at 10krpm with a quarter inch cutter 80 or 100ipm)
use online calculators to help you
What happens I think is you get those hairs if you regrind the chips and create friction, just spoken from my experience, but in my case they all came off with just my thumb
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