At American Flexible Products, our laser cutting service utilizes light to create intricate designs with precision and accuracy. Through laser cutting, a focused, high-energy light beam is used to make precise cuts and etchings in a wide range of materials. With industrial computer-controlled equipment, we can shape your parts efficiently without sacrificing quality.
But that’s just the start of the numerous advantages of using laser cutting for your custom flexible material fabrication. Let’s take a closer look at why customers consider laser cutting to be one of the most popular and useful choices when it comes to complicated design specs.
How Does the Laser Cutting Process Work?
Laser cutting is a process that involves using a high-energy laser beam to create a small, concentrated area of intense heat. This heat causes the material to quickly melt or vaporize, allowing the beam to accurately cut through the material with precision and speed. The gas blast removes the melted material, exposing the cut bottom to allow renewed melting and localized cooling, facilitating the cut.
Laser cutting and laser etching are used for both miniature and large parts, as well as for prototype and production quantities. At American Flexible Products, our material techs use laser cutting to shape your parts in three ways:
- Single-Layer Cutting (Through-Cutting): The laser cuts completely through a single substrate from top to bottom. This technique is ideal for producing standalone individual parts such as solid gaskets, single-sheet labels, shim stock, or custom textiles that don’t require a backing liner.
- Multi-Layer Cutting (Laminate Cutting): The laser slices through multiple stacked or laminated materials, such as a top film, an internal adhesive layer, and a foam core, in a single pass. This ensures perfectly aligned edges across all layers without the risk of layer delamination or edge fraying caused by mechanical blades.
- Laser Kiss-Cutting: The laser power is precisely controlled to cut through the face material and adhesive layer while leaving the underlying release liner intact. This is essential for labels, parts with tabs, custom adhesive pads, and “peel-and-stick” components delivered on sheets for easy application.
What are the Benefits of Laser Cutting?
The advantages of custom industrial laser cutting are numerous. Here are just a few of the biggest benefits of using laser cutting:
Quick Turn Prototypes
Rapid prototyping is a fantastic approach for developing products because it’s precise, cost-effective, and produces minimal waste. If you need speedy product development, laser cutting may be a viable option.
No Tooling Necessary
One of the biggest advantages of laser cutting, especially for rapid prototyping, is that it doesn’t require any tooling, making the entire process more efficient. Laser cutting also makes intricate designs possible with more polished edges, so no buffing is needed. As an added benefit, laser cutting requires less maintenance because no blades have to be sharpened or replaced. All of these factors contribute to lower production costs.
Better precision & Tight Tolerances
Since industrial laser cutting is a versatile technology, it is often adapted to cut vastly different materials with the same quality and efficiency. The high quality of laser cutting is due to the narrowness of the energy beam and the accuracy with which the material or laser optics can be maneuvered. This method enables the cutting of intricate designs at high feed rates, even in challenging or delicate material substrates, such as:
- Ultra-thin polymer films that may wrinkle, tear, or stretch under mechanical blades.
- Soft polyurethane, silicone, or EVA foams that may compress or distort when pressed with a physical die.
- High-tack adhesives and transfer tapes, which can gum up steel blades.
- Multi-layer laminates where individual materials have different melting points or other properties.
- Small and detailed parts that are too intricate to cut accurately with a tool or waterjet cutting.
Laser Cutting Drawbacks & Considerations
Laser cutting offers excellent precision and versatility, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for every application. Factors like production volume, material properties, and end-use applications all determine the best converting method.
- Production volume: Laser cutting eliminates tooling costs, which is why it’s an ideal choice for prototyping and low- to medium-volume production. However, for large production runs, traditional die cutting may provide a lower cost-per-part once tooling is in place.
- Heat-sensitive materials: The intense heat produced by lasers may cause discoloration, melted edges, or cosmetic changes for some materials. While these outcomes can be minimized with process adjustments, other cutting methods such as die cutting or waterjet cutting may be ideal for highly heat-sensitive materials.
- Material thickness: Laser cutting works best on thin films, foams, tapes, and gaskets. The thicker the material, the more difficult it becomes to maintain clean, straight edges. For these applications, waterjet cutting is often a better solution.
Custom Laser Cutting from American Flexible Products
Laser cutting is one of many converting technologies available. An experienced converter will evaluate your material, tolerances, production volume, and performance requirements to recommend the process that delivers the best balance of quality, lead time, and cost.
American Flexible Products is a nationwide converter of flexible materials from foam to rubber to silicone and more. Custom laser cutting utilizes precise, high-powered cuts to shape the tightest, most complicated design specs for our clients.
No matter which custom converting method is best for your material, our material engineers custom-cut and shape every product to your design specs. Curious whether laser cutting is best for your parts? Give us a call to talk with one of our engineers. We’ll help you decide which type of converting is best for your project.
