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pixelslave -> RE: Lexan (Clear) Toilet Box (5/16/2007 9:16:44 AM)
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Polycarbonate would also be a good choice for materials. I would recommend it over acrylic. If you want a custom shape, you can take a design to a fabrication shop that does vacuum forming and they can make a wood model of the pieces, heat the plastic (typically using infrared heat) and then use vacuum power to pull it down tightly onto the wood model forms such that it conforms to the desired or intended shape. It will still be transparent when finished.
There's a limit to the thickness they can work with doing it this way, but I don't recall what it is. When I worked in the automotive industry, we had prototype parts made using this technique all the time, typically with ~ 1/4" materials, which had good strength for our needs. A toilet would likely need something thicker, depending on the design, which I'd expect would be a function of the number of supports that were included as part of it; which can usually be added and not necessarily vacuum formed with it initially. The greatest benefit would be that you could have the top of it shaped for your comfort so you could see below and the sides could be made of thicker polycarbonate to support the molded top. It can all be easily sealed as well as to hold the usual fluids and such that would be expected of a toilet in the case of spillage by the human inside.
The drawback to what I'm suggesting would be that the process is labor intensive (to make the wood models/forms), thus making this a fairly expensive toilet unless several were to be sold to different customers who would spread the cost of the wood forms between them.
- pixel
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