Hi all,
I can across this YouTube video for making your own mirrored acrylic sheets…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlamcxuB19k
Anyone tried it?
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Tl;dw: wet application of mirror foils on cast acrylic.
Interesting. Nice way to get a mirrored cast acrylic, albeit a bit labor-intensive. Might be situationally preferable if you want to engrave on the first surface, you’d get all the benefits of cast acrylic in that case.
As for the video itself, it’s very slow. If anyone is in a hurry you can skip to the 6:45 for about 60 secs to see the foil application method, and then skip to the final 30 seconds to see the end result. The other 14 mins aren’t that enlightening, you won’t miss much.
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Even at 2X speed I gave up less than 5 minutes in (2 minutes for me). I might revisit it if I ever decide to do a d-i-y mirrored acrylic project but I think I have done less than 1 mirrored acrylic project a year over the 10 years I’ve owned a laser. I feel bad for creators who put the effort in posting a video trying to show something cool but then are just awful presenters and lose their audience.
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It reminded me of so many recipe sites where they start with a novel of prose before getting to the ingredients.
Heck even some MOAG posts get really hung up on the story instead of the project 
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Is this method cheaper or better than just buying mirrored acrylic?
Better? Highly doubtful, at least as far as being a mirror. You won’t ever get the same optical quality as a proper metallized acrylic
Cheaper? Hard to believe, since there’s giant economy of scale when making acrylic products. The mirroring is not that much more expensive than plain. Add to that the material cost of the foils and the labor and inevitable material losses from mistakes etc… it’s probably not an economical winner.
However: It’s got more options, it’s hard to get some types of mirrored finishes. You could do truly unusual combinations like frosted translucent light blue acrylic with a gold foil, something you’ll likely never find any other way.
And as mentioned before, it can be made with cast acrylic. Almost every mirrored acrylic is extruded which has a number of differences from cast, chiefly that cast engraves better and seems to be less prone to uncontrolled crazing and crack propagation.
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