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Mostly Removing Acrylic Scratches
Some time ago I made a simple guide / carrier to help select & arrange smashed glass fragments to fit within a given diameter:
Coaster Layout – selected fragments The laser-engraved guide lines confused GIMP’s edge detection to no end.
It came from a large sheet of 1 mm acrylic, formerly a poster cover, bearing scars of its long history in the “might be useful someday” stash. I wondered if I could remove enough scratches and scuffs to ease GIMP’s workload.
Stipulated: I am a cheapskate.
Laser-cut a suitable sheet and sand both sides with 220 grit paper to what looked like a uniform surface:
Acrylic polishing – 220 Continue scrubbing with 400, 800, 1000, 1500, and 3000 grit papers:
Acrylic polishing – 3000 Massage it with Novus Polish 3, 2, and 1:
Acrylic polishing – Novus 1 At best, it’s more translucent than transparent and definitely not an optical-quality polishing job:
Acrylic polishing – translucency Fortunately, I need not care about the edges, because it goes in a square frame with a circular cutout.
Tape it into that cardboard frame, scan it against a black background, and blow out the contrast to show I should have started with 100 grit paper and paid more attention to that “uniform surface” thing:
Acrylic polishing – scratches In use, though, it doesn’t look all that bad:
Fragment layout – 5in Set B – scan tweaked Come to find out those glittery cracks between all the cuboids still confuse GIMP’s edge detection, but at least hand-tracing the outline is easier without all the lines.
The entire “polishing” series as a slideshow for your amusement:
FWIW, those fragments turned out nicely:
Smashed Glass 3D Printed Coaster – Set B More on that later …
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The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 