Acetone vapor polishing?

[Bartonpipes]

Hello all, is anyone here familiar with a method of using acetone vapors in a closed container to polish ABS plastic? Here's an article I just read on the method.

http://tinyurl.com/pnxbsk3

I am thinking about trying this on a sacrificial light Beige 500 I have. (I bought a lot of three just so I could get the 1961 pink 500 that came with them) If it works well I think this could be a very good method to restore the shine to sanded ABS plastic phones.

Here is a sample of what it can do to 3D printed object.

[TelePlay]

Did you see this topic?

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=5260.0

[Bartonpipes]

Interesting!

It seems like the vapor polishing could be as effective as the solvent polishing with MEK or Acetone, probably it would depend on how long you left the plastics in the container with the vapors.

I would think one of the pros of vapors polishing could be that it would take less of the chemical of choice to work.

[TelePlay]

There are a few more topics on the forum that discuss the tour of procedure for restoring phones. One even got into how WECo did it on a large scale.

Phones that have been chemically restored show up once and a while and the tell tale sign is that the handset and housing emblems are no longer crisp. The chemical flows or rounds off the letters.

IIRC, WECo did it with a conveyor belt at temperatures with an atmosphere within the machine being a combination of chemicals each in there own being plastic solvents. I'm sure the mixture they used was well tested before doing large runs of housings. I think one of the solvents was DCE, something like that. Actually, dichloromethane.

Here's two links I found discussing vapor refinishishing.

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=5030.msg62854#msg62854

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=9344.msg100232#msg100232

Grazing seems to be a bad byproduct of the procedure.



Along the same line of use, there was this recent post, photos of a bottle which contained a diluted mixture of MEK, and water?, that was provided by WECo to field repairmen to give phones they were working on a quick shine, actually, a chemical buffing.

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=14068.0