ohicosplay: Queadlunn- I’ve been messing with polycarbonate plastic the last few days. One thi
ohicosplay: Queadlunn- I’ve been messing with polycarbonate plastic the last few days. One thing is something I’m still working on. The other started out as a cut-off of a 1.5″ PC rod (about1.5″r2x1.5″). I used our bench sander’s 5″ disk (with 80 grit) to do a freehand kind of faceting that turned out pretty nicely. I started out on the sander with 80-grit, then moved to 200-grit sandpaper taped to a piece of sheet-metal laminate. I then used 600-grit with a machine oil on the paper to lubricate (worked okay). This got me to the image labelled #3. Since I know that some plastics can be dyed with fabric dye, I decided to try it out. Due to the plastic I was using, or the dye I had on hand, the gem didn’t really change after ~50 min. Because the heat of the dye bath the polished surface of the larger facets ended up crazing (maybe a thermal effect?). The gem was still mostly the standard polycarbonate blue at this point, so I mixed a purple future wash (~120ml Future, 2 drops each red & blue food coloring) and did one coat. This added a bit of color to it as well as add even more gloss to the gem. Not bad for a day of tinkering, I think I could do another gem like this (given I had all the materials on-hand) in about 3 hours. If I end up making more of these I’ll try to make some kind of faceting jig for our sander. Could be fun! Edit: I used Dylon because it was what we had on hand. A dye for synthetic materials ( like RIT Dyemore or iDye Poly) would probably work better. A test for the future. -- source link