Acrylic and wood adhesion?

[Jay Selway]

Anybody got any pointers or recommendations on how to adhere acrylic to wood? Basically want to do a back lit sign, that's wood, with acrylic letters that are flush mounted.

Thanks in advance.

[Jay Selway]

Doing a little searching, it seems like regular epoxy is the way to go. My question is since the acrylic and wood won't be face to face, but rather edge to edge - will the epoxy create a strong enough bond?

The wood is a 1/4 MDF core ply.

[Ross Moshinsky]

More details would be helpful.

Studs are probably the most common way of mounting a halo letter. I'd consider 3M double sided tape as an option too if the letters aren't too large.

[Lee DeRaud]

Doing a little searching, it seems like regular epoxy is the way to go. My question is since the acrylic and wood won't be face to face, but rather edge to edge - will the epoxy create a strong enough bond?

The wood is a 1/4 MDF core ply.

Ah, for some arbitrarily low value of "wood".

If I'm getting the right image in my head, you're going to have holes in the plywood (in this case shaped like letters), filled with "inlaid" pieces of translucent/transparent acrylic the same thickness, right? Given that it's ply/MDF and won't move around like real wood would, the epoxy will work fine from an adhesive standpoint, but sounds like a total PITA during assembly. (I'd normally use silicone sealer for acrylic-to-wood, but it wouldn't be much easier to deal with in this application.)

Depending on the overall size and durability constraints, I'd think about gluing a thin backer of clear acrylic to the back of the plywood after it's cut...couple dots of silicone sealer would do the job. Then just use regular plastic cement/solvent to glue the letters to that. The nice part is, you can replace the wood part later if necessary without redoing the whole thing.

[Jay Selway]

Great idea. Thanks!