You might recall that I tried printing this fake lens last week and found it quite challenging.
So today for S&G, I figured I’d try to print it in two halves like so:
Then instead of gluing or epoxying them, I joined them with acetone: it’s quite a thin profile, so it’s a good test of the strength of the bond.
Well, I let it cure for half an hour just to make sure all the acetone inside the bond had evaporated, and it certainly is plenty strong! Strong enough to take a vigorous chemical polishing - with acetone also - while applying a fair amount of pressure and stay in one piece.
I polished it by hand for 5 minutes and it’s even a bit lens-y now 🙂
I’ll let it cure for another 24 hours for good measure, then tomorrow I’ll mount it in the lathe and I’ll polish it some more with acetone, to see how clear I can make it.
It’s never going to be any good of course, but it’s interesting to see how much it can be improved, if only to find out what I can do with PLA.
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I assume you’ve been reading about other people’s work on this?
https://www.diyphotography.net/3d-printing-lenses-is-now-a-thing-and-you-can-make-them-yourself/
Yeah I read about others trying to make optically usable lenses. That would be great!
But my purpose was to print a dimensionally accurate template for my 3D-printed frames.
That went south because printing this object in one go with a FDM printer is almost impossible to print cleanly. So I gave up on that. But I was still curious to use it to find out if I could use acetone to reassemble two clean halves of it, and find out what kind of polish PLA can take.
You know, just out of curiosity 🙂
