Originally published at: https://www.shmakerspace.org/2017/07/21/planning-polycarbonate-and-programming/
Tuesday evening was another busy evening at the makerspace with a lot going on and a couple of people visiting the space. It’s even possible that a theme emerged for the evening, which seems to have been the letter ‘P’. Plans were hatched (including some for the Always The Sun festival in September), Phones were…
So how thick would you say that polycarbonate was?
Oh an inch at most 
More accurately it was 0.75mm, so it should be cuttable - I could be wrong but it seems as though the issue is that there’s a limited happy cutting temperature range.
One run at 60-85% power, 80mm/s wasn’t deep enough and just slightly browned the edges. Two runs at that with perhaps a second between them caused some smoking and was probably a deeper cut than needed.
I think my next test would be to try a couple of runs at say 30-50% power, 80mm/s with say 20s between them to allow more cooling. I might also try taking the protective film off to see if that helps too.