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1286 Review
28 Karma

Review on πŸ” Translucent Plexiglass AZM - Milky Acrylic with Enhanced Visibility by Aaron Franklin

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Generally excellent plastic film except 20% too thin

I wanted and used this translucent plastic sheet /panel to replace the (darker) glass sides of a rectangular pendant light I liked the lamp best except its original glass sides were too dark so most of the light from the bulb was absorbed inside and into the glass wasted. Yes, kind of defeats the purpose of the lamp, huh?!So I wanted to replace the glass with something less dark/opaque, almost more transparent to let more light in. The sides of this little lamp are each 4 rectangular sides just under 5" x 8" - provided they were the right thickness and milky white transparency, they block/absorb very little but let in most of the light. I asked pr the seller here (AZ M ) recommends one of their plastics for this purpose, and they clearly recommended this milky translucent material, which turned out to be a good recommendation, a good choice. Although it took a few tries and a couple of days to get a response from the seller, the customer service is a bit mixed. '), with metal channels just over 1/8 inch internal size built into the lamp to hold the glass all around. Thus the advertised 1/8 inch thickness of this plastic sheet would be perfectly acceptable and would fit easily and securely. Aside from the fact that this product is NOT 1/8" thick and NOT 3mm (0.118") thick, it is exactly 0.104" thick, just over 1/10" thick, almost 20% below the stated thickness. Which is doubly egregious because not only is it NOT the thickness they advertised; They also go to great lengths to properly warn that the stated nominal size of 12" x 12" is in fact only nominal, that actual dimensions may be 1/8" smaller (due to notching/cutting effects), thereby an oversize creates the (but erroneous) expectation that the thickness advertised should be the actual thickness in the absence of such a warning ) is 1/8" thick compared to the advertised size. This means it will not fit and didn't sit very well in the channels of my lamp, I had to shove some extra material in to keep these plastic sheets from dangling, very sticky, both the seller and my lamp, this thickness variation also means this plastic sheet is 20% less strong than it should be - hopefully this difference in power will never matter in my side mounted gimbal application do here. My first thought was to cut this sheet of plastic into pieces of the desired size using a saw, say a miter/miter saw or a Bosch jigsaw. I'm assuming both cut fairly well, although they do throw up a lot of plastic dust to clean up and don't really cut a straight, smooth line. So I started manually scoring the plastic hard on both sides along the desired tear/cut line, then squeezing firmly to support it on all sides, then just snapping it in - which worked really well, worked pretty well for straight , clean breaks/cuts, no loss of material through saw cut lines - which cost me some material, however, since each such cut/tear has to go over the entire material, it cannot only cut partially. The plexiglass sheet product is basically what I wanted, but I'm rating it 4 stars and deducting 1 star because it's 20% thinner than advertised, making it difficult for me to use.

Pros
  • Please allow +(-) 1/8" size. Actual size is approx. 11-7/8"x11-7/8"
Cons
  • No automatic