I was considering working with wood for my next design,k.. and not such an endeavour to build..
Otherwise might go perspex.
If you find working with wood easy, you might consider contact cementing on a plastic product & silicone the joints (i.e. aquarium silicone?). White PVC glue makes an excellent cement for laminate on wood if you can keep the pieces under pressure until set (i.e. stuff the crevices with a sock, etc.), not sure about Kydex. We used to use a really low-tack one-side glue with the Kydex on walls, with a similar texture to white glue.
You can choose any wood to build your structure, then use one of these two great easy to work with products are:
Kydex (or equivalent): It is the material you see half way up nearly all hospital hallway walls. It can be cut with kitchen shears/scissors. It usually has a hair-cell finish, but you can reverse it for a smooth finish. It is some type of acrylic-PVC.
Post forming plastic laminate: i.e. commercial fabricators plastic laminate for counter tops. It is much thinner than regular home-store variety as it is suitable for doing the small radius bullnoses on countertops. It can be cut with kitchen shears/scissors. (you might be able to get the size of pieces you want for free from a commercial countertop factory).
Both materials are about 0.020" thick, and really nice to work with fitting into little spaces & trimming to fit with scissors or utility knife.
Industrial construction contractors often use a lot of
low viscosity bolt setting/bonding epoxy. I used to buy it in about
9 liter kits in pails, not tubes. A small amount of this would go a long way in making an impervious wood finish, if you could find a contractor to give you something like this. I've also made curved parts by lining a small form with kitchen wrap & putting a really dry mixture of sand dampened with the low viscosity epoxy (a small amount of epoxy goes a LONG way for a non-structural part, then sealed the part later with a coat of the epoxy.
Perhaps
fiberglass work, resin might be a good wood finish that would penetrate & seal prior to curing to a chem. resistant finish.
Hope this tweaks your imagination. Thanks for your activity here. I'm learning a lot by watching your activities here, my heads spinning....or perhaps that's just the lack of air in my 3'x4' closet doing my 25 rolls of film from the Paris trip
