Tim - I drilled the center of a piece of epoxy bar stock about 5/8 in.
thick. Then a brass weight was glued with epoxy to the bottom and a piece
of paper with the scale for a hydrometer was placed inside. Then a thin top
was glued on with the tiniest gooping onto the the first number of the paper
scale. Suprizingly, it looked noticebly better than the others.

Hul

Tim Wescott wrote:
I was going to say "acrylic", but then I realized that maybe I would be
narrowing it down too much.

How hard is it to machine a part out of hard clear plastic and then make
it clear again? Any gotchas? What plastic should one start with? What
question am I failing to ask?

The part will be cylindrically symmetric (i.e., turned on a lathe), about
1.5" diameter, 0.5" tall, and accuracy can be as sloppy as 0.01 in all
directions. But it would need to be "pretty".

Some plastic that is a bit more rugged in impact than acrylic would be
nice (do they make crystal clear Delrin?) but I can't think of anything
like that which would actually work in this case.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com