All you need are acrylic scraps, and acetone.

The acrylic is broken up into tiny pieces that fit into the syringe.

Acetone is added to dissolve the acrylic, turning the mixture into a very thick goop. The air bubble in the above picture took about a minute to go from the bottom of the syringe to the top.

Place a little dab on the acrylic you wish to join. It sets very fast and doesn’t run. If you need more working time, dilute the mixture with more acetone.

The cement dissolves the acrylic, welding the two pieces together. The acrylic suspended in the mixture hardens when the acetone evaporates leaving a nice fillet.

Even edge joins like this are very tough. I couldn’t break these apart without tools. These samples (and ready to use cement) are on the soldering bench shelf above the monitor — check them out!

For those who haven’t seen one, a CNC machine basically reads a series of shapes drawn on a computer, and cuts them out of wood, metal, plastic, etc. I’ve been thinking about a housing for a clock project I’m working on (details are to come), and discussed how the CNC could make it happen.

Karl recommended that I try doodling it in Inkscape, then using the Gcodetools plug-in to generate output that his machine could parse and draw with.

And then, we printed. Did it work? Video is worth a thousand blurry words!

I think so.