A guest scoured my acrylic bath with a kitchen scouring pad

[The_Ghost]

A guest scoured my acrylic bath with a kitchen scouring pad. It's a fairly new, good quality acrylic and had a beautiful high gloss finish. Now it is dull and matt, but otherwise undamaged. I have searched all over but not found a reference to this exact problem. Various forums suggest that acrylic baths can be polished with T-Cut and a lot of elbow grease. I have also seen a special product called Acryl Star, but it comes in 90ml tubes and appears to be intended for individual scratches - I can't find any information on how much I would need for a whole bath. Does anyone have any experience or recommendations?

[Oaktree]

Not had a problem with an acrylic bath. However did manage to scour a piece of plastic "frosted glass" in an internal door. Looking online I found advice from people with motor boats about polishing perspex wind screens. There was lots of discussion of the best fine grained polishing paste that would restore transparency. The cheapest answer was toothpaste. We tried that on the plastic frosted glass and it is much improved. Not perfect, but a lot better than it was.

[plumbbob]

Basically. an acrylic bath is no different to many other similar surfaces as found on boats and caravans. Any professional installer will at some time or other have to repair a bath that has been damaged either before or during an install.

Yes, there are special products on the market that can help, but products such as T-cut will work well. I've never had to tackle a large area such as you are looking at so you might have to be a little resourceful to reduce the labour that will be involved.

Try a small area first to see how the surface reacts, then buff it up afterwards with a white or clear car type polish.

[The_Ghost]

Thanks for that. You are absolutely right, T-Cut did the job. And yes, it wouldn't really have been possible by hand. I finally found a good quality polishing attachment for a drill and that did the job in under half an hour. It's hard to say if it's quite as good as new, but if not, it's very, very close. I guess this technique would work well for restoring any old, tired, dull acrylic bath.

[plumbbob]

Glad you sorted the problem.

People imagine the surface of a bath is only a thin layer and cannot be repaired. In fact, it is several millimetres thick and it is possible to use a file even to remove deep blemishes working backwards with finer and finer abrasives until a polished surface is revealed.