Pretty neat Mike.  Both plastic parts came out really nice.  The router was a good idea on the second piece.  I like your write-up and the pictures on your website.  Besides people with Willys, probably some people wanting to make some other sort of gizmos out of acrylic will stumble onto your website and it'll help them out a lot.

If you can see down into the part from the top and you don't like how the frosted  part on the back side looks -- like in the areas where you had to drill 1/4" and 5/16" (or whatever it was) holes, there's a way you can make those look almost polished.  At Tap Plastics they sell some solvent cement for gluing acrylic that has "methylene chloride" as the main ingredient.  You can paint over a rough machined surface with that solvent cement, and it will melt the surface and when it dries, it will look almost polished.  They have two kinds. One is a low viscosity that's good when you want to make a quick bond like a T between two 1/4" acrylic sheets that are machined to mate closely with each other, and the other one is a thickened one that is made for laminating larger slabs of acrylic to each other -- like if you wanted to glue two large 1/2" slabs together to make a 1" slab.  The low viscosity one is very runny -- more runny than say gasoline -- and it dries quickly so it doesn't have much time to melt the plastic unless it's sandwiched between two pieces, and if you put too much on, it tends to run all over the place where you don't want it.  You usually make the bonds by "capillary action" where you just dab some at the edge of the joint and it wicks in by capillary action.  But the thickened laminating type solvent cement stays liquid for a while.  It's about as thick as honey.  You can use a little paintbrush to paint that thicker one on and it will melt the rough machined surface and when it dries, it'll look like glass. Sometimes it'll wind up looking a little milky.  It depends on how rough it is and whether tiny air bubbles get mixed in.  When you bond something using those solvent cements, and you do it right, you can see right through the joint.  Solvent cement actually welds the plastic together by melting both sides into each other.  With the thick syrupy stuff, you have more time to squeeze and try to work out the bubbles.

But actually, probably that machined satin finish on the bottom side probably looks good.  It probably helps it to refract more light and make it sparkle more.

 

I just thought I'd let you know about that solvent cement stuff just in case you might want to make the bottom look clear.the they

I think somebody makes acrylic cement which is dyed different colors so that people can make artistic things where you look through a thick slab and see multiple layers and colors at the bond joints.  Or sometimes they'll laminate different colors of acrylic together so that they can make parts with colored stripes all through them. Probably some acrylic lacquer or enamel would do the same job if you just wanted to paint the bottom to make it opaque.  Maybe some black paint would make the bottom just sort of disappear.

So how did you mount the acrylic piece to the chrome ornament?  Does it just snap in there, or is it screwed in, or do you have to glue it in?  Hey, if you have to glue it in, Home Depot sells some stuff called something like "tub and shower surround adhesive".  It's like "liquid nails", but it's designed to glue acrylic panels to the wall without affecting the acrylic.  Most adhesives will dissolve and make a mess out of acrylic, or warp the acrylic, but that stuff doesn't affect it.  I used some before.  It works pretty well.  It dries slowly into a soft stretchy white rubber.  It's moisture resistant. I think it's about $2 in a 12" caulking gun tube.