Thinner acrylic or alternative substrate?

[MGB_LE]

We need some suggestions for workflow -and- tools when working with acrylic .375" to .5" thick 48x96" sheets. We almost exclusively do second surface printing with this substrate.
Clearly weight is a factor and the thicker it is the more it weighs. This weight problem can lead to issues loading and unloading the material onto the HP R1000 printer and then onto Colex flatbed router table. Often we're storing the sheet a few days before packaging and then the packaging of the print itself. The white ink on the printed side adds to the problem at each step after printing as it scratches so very easily. I have to rout the material with the printed side down on the Colex, if I rout with printed side up debris that is caught in the router brush leaves scratches along the edges and where standoff holes are drilled. Routing with printed side down means, printed piece has to be laid down and picked up straight to avoid scratching from the table.

Aesthetically, when one is looking at a second surface print on acrylic, the thickness of the acrylic itself is negligible to the viewing experience. As it is I have four sheets of 7/16ths thick acrylic and wondering if anyone understands the extra care and effort that must be put in handling material this thick and heavy at each step of the process. We have a felling if salespeople switched jobs for a day they would never sell any acrylic over a ¼ inch thick.

We need some suggestions for workflow -and- tools when working with acrylic 48x96" sheets. What feedback do you have for us around suggesting alternate substrate (or thicknerss of substrate), or working better with the substrate we have?

 

[CanuckSigns]

We do not flatbed print on acrylic, but we do reverse print on vinyl and apply to second surface quite a bit.

Depending on the overall size of the pieces, I can see why someone would want panels thicker than 0.25", when we do lobby signs over 48" long we use 0.375" or 0.5" to give it enough rigidity, otherwise you need to use too many standoffs.

As for handling, have you tried applying premask to the printed side to protect it then routing print side up?

 

[johnnysigns]

I don't know the colex dust collection setup, but you can't set that to be slightly above the substrate if you're cutting print side up? I know on our AXYZ we can manually set the height of the dust collection boot. If the prints are sensitive I put a scrap piece of 0.060 styrene or Petg on the board when I set the dust boot height so it won't actually contact the print when we router cut. The alternative is to premask the print side as mentioned above.