Finishing acrylic

[Twm (Twm Davies)]

Hello, I’ve been playing around with different materials to see how they behave. I wanted to see if i could make 3D structures from stacking bits of laser cut acrylic.
I used some of the 9mm acrylic(?) from the scrap laser shelf.

1st test was a salt and pepper holder made from 4 layers of 9mm with 3 containing 2x holes.
I tried a few different glues but in the end found ‘Tensol 12’ to give the best finish - apparently it ‘melts’ the two parts of acrylic together to create a solid bond but doesn’t work across gaps very well. It also worked well affixing wood to acrylic as seen in the pencil holder.

I wonder if anyone can help with a few questions?

1. Am I on the right track with the Tensol. It seems to do the trick - note that i’m not going for food grade here.
2. The laser cutter doesn’t give an amazing edge. What are the options for smoothing off / buffing it. I’ve never worked with acrylic so not sure if you can sand it/polish.

I have a project in mind where I want to stack 8-9 pieces and it want the edge to look continuous.

[Barnaby_Coote]

options for smoothing are:

-sandpaper taped to a granite tile or pane of glass (or anything super flat) for coarse grain
-water stone for fine to ultra fine grain
-buffing wheel and compound for getting a mirror finish

you should probably do all three in that order
make sure the sanding surfaces are really really flat

[Barnaby_Coote]

i haven’t done pmma but i’ve heard it polishes ok. epoxy fares well.

But you could always make a cast and polish that! You can mix resins with a filler like powdered marble or bronze and stuff like that. Might be good for your holder to give a nice weight to it.

[Twm (Twm Davies)]

Thanks Barnaby, that’s useful.
I’m really interesting in casting but not sure where to start.
I want to create the following 2d shape ‘extruded’ in 3D to about 9cm. The width is 60cm so I imagine it would be quite difficult to create a mould.

[joeatkin2]

T cut works