Polystyrene dissolves easily with acetone. Someone showed me that around 10 years ago,
when we had a quiet day in the lab.
Some new staff occasionally use acetone to try to clean marks off of balance doors (the
sidebits) and often dissolve the plastic runner so that the doors no longer smoothly slide
open/closed, instead they stick :(
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
PS. Anyone here in the UK see the Royal Institution Lectures on Channel 5 over Christmas?
If you did can you please point me (offlist please) in the direction of a good guide on
how quantum CPU's work. I understood all the other stuff, but the quantum stuff
confused me :(
--- On Thu, 22/1/09, Paul Koning <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
From: Paul Koning <Paul_Koning at dell.com>
Subject: Re: Wall warts; was: hams on classiccmp
To: cctalk at
classiccmp.org
Date: Thursday, 22 January, 2009, 10:39 PM
>>>> "Roy" == Roy J Tellason
<rtellason at verizon.net> writes:
Roy> Maybe I'll try the stuff out on some scrap plastic first, then.
Roy> I've heard about it being handy, but haven't used it yet.
You'd have to make sure it's the right kind of plastic. There is a
whole lot of variation as to what solvents (if any) will dissolve
"plastic". PE and PTFE don't dissolve at all, while many other
plastics have their particular "good solvent". I remember furan for
vinyl (as in "waterbed patch kits"), something completely different
for polystyrene, and probably something different yet again for
plexiglas.
Then there are fun details like this one: ethanol is a nice harmless
cleaning fluid for many things, including most plastics. But it will
turn plexiglas matte.
paul