Felt cuts with a sharpness scissors cannot match, and the edge is heat-sealed so it does not fray. Provided you can tell real wool from synthetic felt.
Wool or synthetic: not the same material
Wool felt cuts cleanly, with a burnt-hair smell and a slightly browned edge. Synthetic felt (polyester, acrylic) melts: the edge turns hard, sometimes glassy, and yellows.
Neither contains chlorine, so both are laser-safe — but avoid unlabelled blends, and above all anything with a plasticised backing.
Settings: what really matters
Very little energy and high speed: felt cuts almost instantly. The right setting is the one that goes through without browning more than a tenth of a millimetre either side of the line.
Felt lifts in the air-assist draught. A honeycomb bed, magnets or a cardboard frame stop an already-cut piece shifting and being cut twice.
Engraving felt is rarely worthwhile: the laser crushes the fibres rather than creating contrast. Keep it for cuts and fretwork.
Risks and finishing
Wool barely ignites but smokes heavily; synthetics melt and can drip. Either way, keep extraction on and watch constantly: a lifted piece passing back under the beam is the classic cause of textile fires.
The smell soaks into the material: let pieces air out before sewing or packing them. Gentle brushing removes edge dust, but do not try to clean a burn — it is permanent.
Every figure on LaserSettings comes with the machine, the laser source, the material and the thickness it was tested on. A setting published for a 10 W diode says nothing about a 40 W CO2, and a setting for 3 mm says nothing about 6 mm: check those four things before you copy any number.
Settings are confirmed or disputed by the members who reproduce them, so reliability comes from cross-checking rather than popularity. Photos of the result — cut edges, engraving shades, scorching — tell you more than a single number found on a forum.
Whatever the material, treat a published setting as a starting point: run a small power/speed test grid on an offcut, clean the lens, redo the focus, work with fume extraction and air assist, wear glasses rated for your wavelength and never leave the machine unattended.