Please add attribution on your Laser Wiki… a large portion of it is basically cut-and-paste from the ATX Hackerspace wiki. This is okay in general, since we did publish under an open source license, but it does require credit and attribution if you do so under those terms. Please link back to our Laser Wiki page, or just add a credit saying where the information came from.
To clarify: according to the Wiki history, the ATX Hackerspace attribution has been in place since the original posting of the information back in Sept 2015. Martin (@martinbogo) may have overlooked it since it was at the very bottom of the page.
The international (OSHA NIOSH ACGIH) maximum allowable exposure to HCN is 4.7ppm.
I tested laser etching a flat piece of 2mm ABS ( used for vacuum forming ) and put an HCN detector in the exhaust tube to catch the fumes for 60 seconds with a flat rastered rectangle at 30% power / 50% speed on our PLS 6.60 laser cutter. This was back in 2011 or so – and we saw about 0.4->1.2ppm HCN emissions during rastering, and about 0.2-0.8ppm HCN emissions when cutting.
YMMV, and good science says you should set up a similar experiment and re-test… peer review is important.
Previous facilities I’ve been in, including ones where the exhaust went in room after some filtering, ABS was never an issue with HCN. We still prohibited Polycarbonate, but we used to laser ABS panels for pelican cases there all the time. Was disappointed I can’t do them at DMS and they’re not worth making out of acrylic.
I’d be interested in helping retest this should it come to that.
