I buggered it up

[Bill Wright]

I needed to put a polycarbonate window in an aluminium box.Afterwards I noticed that the inside of the box had a lot of marking done with felt pen. I decided to remove these with acetone. This worked perfectly, but some of the acetone ran down onto the polycarbonate.

In order to get wise after the event I have now googled polycarbonate+acetone. It turns out that pretty well everybody in the world except me knew that letting acetone anywhere near polycarbonate inevitably leads to disaster. Bah!

Bill

[Tim+]

I hope you took pictures. ;-)

Tim

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Yes it does. Its a solvent. I first found this out by putting some in a very old red hard plastic food container. It of course evaporated quite quickly but it was then firmly glued to the window sill, and had to be chipped off and sanded and the sill repainted. This was 1967 ish.

Another side effect is it makes you go very squiffy in an enclosed room on a hot day.

Also do not use certain switch cleaners near some plastic headphone sockets, they tend to melt. It said safe with common plastics, I must have had an uncommon one on my mixer. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Another substance to watch is the old Dope stuff as used on model aircraft, Particularly the clear stuff, as it shrinks so if you get it on any clothing its a bloomin mess. I don't know how badly damaged the sheet is, but Perspex polish can be used to remove a lot of surface blemishes, but if its gone deep then its a new window. Brian

[spuorgelgoog]

That would be the "festive frosted effect" you worked so hard to intentionally achieve.

Owain

[fred]

Its a very effective paint stripper as I discovered when some of it got on the stove enamelled lid of the deep freeze

[Graham.]

My new kitchen has man made "granite" style work tops. I read somewhere that acetone would dissolve them and shortly afterwards there was an accident with a bottle of nail polish remover. Oh shit, I thought and flooded the area with water, unsure if it would make things better or worse.

I perhaps needn't have worried(?) as it turned out the nail polish remover was based on ethyl acetate. I subsequently found a bottle of acetone nail polish remover and marked it "keep out of kitchen".

[newshound]

If it took that off it ain't stove enamelled!

[tabbypurr]

yup, and stove enamelled freezers are a real rarity. Usually they're powder coated.

NT