As a test I was cutting an array of five-pointed stars about 3/4″ in diameter out of quarter-inch acrylic. It took about 60 speed and 100 power to cut the outline of the stars all the way through the acrylic, but they remained connected to the sheet at the sharp corners. Even at 40 speed, they had to be mechanically punched out, and the points were rough. The whole area of the material was quite warm at the end of the job. I’m thinking the sharp points were rewelding to the sheet after the cut.

As an experiment I tried cutting at 80 speed, but with the number of passes in the vector settings table set to 2. That should be effectively about the same power and about the same overall duration as cutting at 40 speed. Sure enough, the results were pretty similar. The stars were still stuck in the sheet by their corners. With passes set to 2, each individual star is cut out twice before moving to the next one. There’s no delay between the two passes. For a small job like a single star, there’s not much benefit in dividing the power up into two passes.

Then I changed the passes setting back to 1, and ran the whole job twice. That’s the same effective power delivered as setting passes to 2 and running the job once, but it gives each cut time to cool down between the two doses of heat. The result was much better. The stars dropped out of the sheet (with a bit of shaking) and their points were pretty clean.

Consider using this trick if you run into rewelding on sharp corners when cutting thick acrylic.