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Nano, I appreciate the concern, and I agree with your assessments considering the “inner” contact surface areas lacking to hold it together. I also agree with your point that the silicon beads and fill areas do nothing for bonding strength. And even more agreement that areas with a thin layer of silicon against flat equal surfaces are the ideal bonding joints and yields the greatest strength. Thus, for the sake of my example below, we'll call these ideal areas "contact patch".
I believe the confusion (and this may include me – haha) is with the brace implementation and understanding what forces this external brace is actually opposing/supporting. So let me try and explain:
Please refer to the attached pics. I highlighted in green the surface areas that will yield the most adhesive strength (i.e. contact patch) for each type of bonding scenario.
Pic # 1:
Looking at Fig-A, some of the contact patch is on the opposite side (exterior). I believe THIS is what is so controversial about my brace strategy. True, it's hard to get one's head around the physics here. Tank forces will want to push the glass panels apart and against the braces exterior contact patches. However, the brace will want to bend in the center while urging to "slip off" the corner – but to bend it would need slack, and the only way to get it is if the exterior contact patches bonded to the glass gave way. Therefore, for failure to occur, the brace would either need to split right down the middle, OR slip off one of the contact patches between the brace and the exterior side of the glass. I tried to illustrate this in Fig-B. As you can see, a lot is ridding on the brace! This is why the additional inner strip would be desired.
So the forces on the brace are 1) pull-apart, 2) contact patch slipage.
Acrylic thickness play into #1, while contact patch length plays into #2
Outstanding question would then be:
- how thick acrylic would be required?
- should we lengthen the exterior contact patches (widen the brace)? I feel if one did this, then the acrylic itself wouldn't have to be so thick because the main forces on it is trying to pull it apart. It's not easy to stretch or pull apart acrylic.
Pic # 2:
These pics illustrate more proper (stronger) examples to bond the side panels using only glass. However beveling will be required (except for Fig-E). While Fig-E doesn’t require beveling the panels, it does require a beveled strip of glass and who has the ability to create an inner glass triangle rod shaped like that! And, no I don’t feel a round rod would provide what I define as contact patch.
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