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Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

thread334-445847

Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

(OP)
If there is no way to roll back time and make old brittle plastic tail light lenses youthful and supple, Step 2 would be use the old lenses to make molds to cast new ones.

What would be a good casting plastic that could be made red with decent transparency/translucency ?

thanks,

Dan T

RE: Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

Urethanes, maybe not the best stuff but pourable and readily available.

Sheet acrylic and polycarbonate can be readily thermoformed with low-cost molds.

RE: Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

Might be cheaper & easier to 3D print them but the quality and material properties are all over the place. Are you sure you can't just buy new old stock?

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

RE: Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

I have no idea where you are but where I live, we have Tap Plastics Linkand they sell clear casting resins & mold forming products. Clear Methyl methacrylate (Plexiglass Resin) and Polyester. It is also possible that a good boat supply house has some good candidate materials for this project.

RE: Revitalizing 40 year old plastic lenses, plan B.

(OP)
thanks All,

Dan T in Massachusetts

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