Acrylic plastic is a wonderfully versatile and durable material, and takes particularly well to engraving -- skilled engraving services can craft incredibly complex designs and text on the surface  of acrylic objects, and these skills are often on show when you look at commercial signage, sports trophies, plastic furniture and other objects commonly made with acrylics. However, traditional methods for engraving designs onto acrylic plastics have their downsides, so many individuals and businesses are switching to laser engraving for their acrylic design needs.

What is laser engraving?

Laser engraving utilises very similar technology and equipment to commercial laser cutting processes, and work to the same levels of exacting precision and efficiency. However, while laser cutters use powerful laser beams capable of slicing through sheets of material, laser engravers use more tightly focused lasers to 'burn' designs into the surfaces of objects and materials. 

What are the advantages of switching from traditional engraving to laser engraving?

If you or your business have ongoing engraving requirements, switching from traditional engraving services to having your acrylics laser engraved can have a host of appealing advantages:

Precision: Traditional engraving machines are limited largely by their human operators, and even the most skilled and experienced engraver has limits when it comes to the precision, scale and accuracy of their engravings. Computer-controlled engraving lasers, on the other hand, have no such limitations, and are capable of creating designs with levels of precision and accuracy too fine to be discernible by the naked eye. 

Consistency: However complex or finely-detailed your chosen design may be, a laser engraving machine will reproduce it exactly every time, whether you order one reproduction of a design or a thousand. As such, laser engraving is the engraving method of choice when it comes to engraving mass-produced acrylic products.

Speed: Despite this extraordinary level of precision and consistency, laser engravers are also capable of completing engravings at a much faster rate than any other engraving method. This make for much faster turnaround of products, and shortens the wait between submitting a design and receiving your engraved acrylics considerably. Laser engraving can also be conducted 24 hours a day, since the machines require minimal oversight to function, so laser engravers should be your first port of call if you have a particularly urgent product order to fulfill.

Aesthetics: The clean, exact nature of an engraving produced with lasers gives the engraving sharp edges and corners, which catch and reflect light more easily than the more uneven engravings left by conventional engraving machines. This can make laser-cut engravings much more visible, vibrant and aesthetically pleasing, and is particularly useful for increasing the visibility of engravings on clear acrylics.

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