Working with Acrylic sheets:
Acrylic is a versatile material that can be cut, drilled, laser cut and thermoformed.
Acrylic is a thermoplastic which means that when it is heated above 140-180°C it becomes flexible. This allows the material to be formed into the required shape or bent. Once the material cools below 85°C it becomes rigid again.
Acrylic sheets are often shaped using a CNC router or laser cutter. The edge of laser cut Acrylic has a pleasing polished look. If you look carefully at the edge of a piece of laser cut Acrylic you can often see slight vertical lines that are caused by the pulses a laser uses when cutting.
If you want to get a perfectly smooth finish on the edge of piece of machined Acrylic a polishing technique can be used. Typical polishing techniques include diamond polishing and flame polishing.
It also possible to etch the surface of a Acrylic sheet using a laser cutter. This can produce some very pleasing visual effects.
More detailed information and resources on working with Acrylic can be found in this resource section.
Tolerances:
The manufacturing tolerance for the thickness of cast acrylic sheets are the stated thickness +/-10% plus +/- 0.4mm. This means a 5mm Acrylic sheet could be between 4.1mm and 5.9mm in thickness.
Please note that it is possible for there to be slight colour variations between batches.
The manufacturing process for these sheets can lead to variances in length and width measurements between batches. Tolerances of up to +/- 1.7% are possible. The maximum we have recorded is plus 10mm to a length measurement.