more on materials

Hello fellow travelers, I hope and pray that Fiona and Magdy you get better soon and are getting plenty of rest.

I checked out Perspex and its about $90 for a sheet of 1.22m x 2.44m, so will try to work out how to get the most pieces out of that. We do buy the whole sheet so if we can adjust our panel size to accommodate that as you suggested Magdy, that would be good and not too hard to do, I can have a go at working it out if you like. 3mm looked like a good thickness to me. . .what do you think? It will take a week for it to get here. Maybe we could get equal quantities of opal and clear? Or more of the clear than the opal? I think the opal would give better translucency than sticking our own paper on the back, but maybe we can make our own choices on that for our own panels, as we might want to play with translucency effects using paper or other materials, what do you think?

I also checked out timber framing and there is another pine baton a bit wider but not as thick (50mm x 25mm) for the same price as the 42 x 35 mm, but it doesn’t have rounded edges and is slightly heavier in weight. There is also a wider framing, 70 x 35mm, it is twice the cost ($3.28 / linear metre) but still quite light in weight, and structurally would be more stable, would add more weight to the whole structure, but would give the panels more three dimensionality. I guess it depends how thick we want the panels to be, ie how big the gap between the Perspex, ie is a 2cm gap enough or do we want it wider than that, say 5cm?

Also in terms of tranporting the panels, my car could hold panels 700mm wide by 2m long, if that's of any relevance.

Dave not sure if you are getting all these emails too? It's probably all a bit techy at the moment, how are you anyway?