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Originally Posted by TripleMoonsExotic
I was curious how exactly the acrylic was attached together in things like the vendor displays. Is it an epoxy of some sort?
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Like the other posters said, it is welded together with a solvent rather than heat.
To be a bit more specific, most of the time builders take two panels of acrylic and use masking tape to hold them together with the edge of one piece butting up against the surface of another. Typically the paper wrap is left on both panels other than the areas that are being welded together.
With the two panels taped together and held at 90* the solvent is then drawn up in a sryinge and injected along the outside of the joint where the two panels meet. The solvent wicks into the joint via capillary action and the two pieces melt together.
Solvent welding acrylic is pretty easy. The hard part is prepping the edge of the panel that is being welded to the surface of the other. It has to be pretty much perfect.
If your making a cube of some sort then you also have to make sure that your panels are perfect square and sized correctly so they match up with the rest of the structure. The difficulty is in the cutting and edge prepping. Large scale acrylic shops have expensive machinery that does this quickly and accurately.
These solvent welds are very strong. Even with super large acrylic aquaria the entire thing is held together with solvent welds. Given the pressure that 400 lbs of water can exert on something as modest as a 55 gallon aquarium I think the strength of the welds is pretty good.