everyone welcome to primal reef and acrylics today is going to be an informational video on a do-it-yourself or how to bond weld acrylics there are many methods of gluing things such as wood you got willing method for metal but whereas where where as it comes to acrylic a lot of people are actually confused or don't know how to glue two pieces of plastic together your conventional method of gluing with your regular Home Depot glue would not work epoxy again it's a substance of glue which which chemically bonds two chemicals together and then it hardens it on whatever surface you want but where as it comes to acrylic it's actually a little bit tougher to find little certain information online about this a lot of companies do actually make them what it is sorry is there's a solution called weld on one two three and four what it is it's a water substance liquid very thin what you see in a little vial here alright with the I believe it's a 25 gauge needle when you go to a plastic or acrylic store I'm here in Toronto Ontario Canada which is in the Greater Toronto Area of the GTA we have I have a company that I deal with called plastic world's so if you guys do decide to go down there the ones that live in the GTA do refer the the guys Michael repeater the after the owners of the company that you you've seen the informational videos online I primal reef in acrylics so hence going forward when you bond acrylic there's two things you really really have to watch out for one is the thickness of acrylic you are bonding together over here I have a 3/8 yes 3/8 of an inch now the reason why I say thickness is because sometimes you can get acrylics and different sheets anywhere from I believe it's 1/8 1/16 all the way up to quarter quarter inch 3/8 half inch three quarters of an inch one inch and so forth the for the video here the reason why I say watch out for what type acrylic you use is because in bonding acrylic what's most important is having one of the most flat or smoothest surface as you can when you're putting two pieces together unlike metal you can have different types of metal and use welding method to join we're using two metals metal and then the welding machine will actually have depending on what type of welding machine you buy will have a different substance of metal that bonds it together by melting or fusing two pieces together this is similar but again we're using liquid a chemical compound here which be careful some of you may be alert may have allergic reactions to it so wears gloves if you want please read the instructions on the chemical bottle when you do buy it I'll go make another video in the future what type of chemicals are there or weld-on chemicals are there to fuse two pieces of plastics together so for that being said I got two pieces here I have both 3/8 one of them is a soft cut edge I don't know if you can see properly I'm going to try to glitter this but a soft cut edge is just a regular saw a miter saw that passed and cut this piece of acrylic here the second is also just a scrap once again it's a frosted sheet this piece here was sawed cut you will see an indent groove there a couple holes but I actually sanded this part smooth as possible as I can so what I use I use a little sponge which you can pick up at a regular Home Depot so the sponge has two velcro side edges and it has two different types of sponge layer you have the regular soft sponge so if I squeeze sorry if I squeeze this in you can see is very soft now the other side it's pretty sturdy very very stiff I use this site to sand all the pieces down I believe this grid here is a 120 grit sandpaper so I use this to sand the edges first and then I'll take the velcro off and put the 1200 grid on to the other side and then keep filing it down or smooth it down up until you get a pretty smooth surface now the best way to flatten an edge when you have acrylic is going through a router a router would give you one of the most flat smooth surfaces as possible it's not going to leave saw-cut marks anywhere so with a little bottle there's a little technique when you use this bottle guys and ladies sorry when you're applying this glue if you just tip it upside down which I'm going to do right now you will see the drops come out if you can see there the drops are coming out okay you don't want to do this because when you're bonding professional pieces together you're gonna have glue and spot marks everywhere on your acrylic so if you're building a sump like what I do you can't use that method what you got to do is squeeze a bottle if you can see there squeeze a bottle as much as you can I would say about 60 percent of the way depending again how long of a piece your grill gluing so when you tip it upside down the vacuum of the air is actually sucking the solution up the air sucking it out sucking up so if you see the bubbles in there this prevents any liquid from dropping so when you go to an acrylic piece you can actually stop the air and you can press down very gently now you see the drops come out if you see right there but if I let go the bubbles return again and there's no solution dropping so that's one technique that I use so going ahead with the socket piece I'm going to show you how if I want to point it right around there sorry if the camera angles a little off so here we go I'm going to glue this piece again I'm going to squeeze the bottle now okay tip it upside down the bubbles are coming out and with one hand I'm going to press down on the acrylic very gently and I'm going to just squeeze the bottle just a little bit so the acrylic glue comes out if you can see there I'm running the glue all the way across now if you probably just seen that jump you see that there are dark spots let me use a pen there's a dark spot there and there's a dark spot here because this wasn't a very smooth surface you can see that what's happening here is when I ran the glue from your right sorry your left to the right of the critic there's a gap there now this part did not get fused however these two ends did this is a very very bad cut so when you have acrylic that you want to bond or fuse together be very careful you don't have these pieces what I like to do sometimes is I will place a flat piece on acrylic whoops there's a little bit of glue there place a flat piece on acrylic and see and put my face down right to the edge and see if I I'll see a little air gap in between if I see an air gap and this piece was a saw cut I'm gonna have to go ahead and file away certain parts of this sorry sand away certain parts of the critic when you have a router cut piece you're now going to have these joints you're now going to have these air pockets and offcuts so now I'm going to go ahead and glue this piece now this please here has a couple little dents and joints however this piece here is actually perfectly cut and it's very very smooth so I'll show you once again so again what you want to do is squeeze the bottle about 60% of the way tip it upside down you see the air bubbles come out there we go air bubbles are coming up so you now you're safe to go you're not going to have any any spots on the the critic sheet on the base pressing the bottle squeezing it now you will see there's a very smooth line of acrylic sorry the glue solution but then again now it's stopped okay so if you guys seen that there's a very nice dark shaded part from here all the way across up until that little dent that I had in the acrylic this is what you call a perfect bond now this I achieve this was a saw cut piece and I achieve this by using a sandpaper in two different grids again 120 grid for the blue and then the brown is a 1200 grid 1200 the bonding time between this glue though well down for that I'm using it's one to three minutes for the fixture time now fix your time doesn't mean it's 100% glued yet so at that point from one to two minutes you don't want to touch your click at all leave it alone anywhere from five to ten minutes is the chemical portion of softening the two plastics so they're in the phases of being molded together or weld it together as one uniform piece again at this point you don't want to start working on that piece by moving it lifting it or putting pressure on it because what's going to happen soon as you put pressure right now if you hear from the tap it's already pretty solid but because of a chemical is still bonding and fusing it together there's still a lot of soft sections in there you want to allow at least 12 to 24 hours I like to give it 48 hours for it to bond 100% small pieces you're okay like this for me too for as a sample I'm going to move it around but in the future when you guys do have pieces give it a lot of time now if you can see here right oh boy right there okay hopefully you guys can see this two different pieces right here you have a piece that was glued here but then it missed a big gap however this section here you can see it's perfectly done there's a little bit of gap in between there now what you can do for those gap is you can use the whale Don glue you can use the world on glue to run it again on the other side there you go now you have a sealed joint I hope you guys can see this in the okay yeah there you go so that's a that's a soft and perfect joint again I all highly recommend everybody get a router cut edge unless you want to go through a whole bunch of acrylic and practice and play with it first hope you guys do like the video on how to glue or weld acrylic if you guys have any questions post them below I will be posting more posting more videos on how to do it yourself acrylic pieces and again this you can build anything you want in the future alright guys thank you for watching primal reefs stay tuned for another video on do-it-yourself